Bored and Brilliant – Book Summary
How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self
Manoush Zomorodi
Macmillan; Airside & Irish edition (22 Feb. 2018)
About the author
Manoush Zomorodi is the host of NPR’s TED Radio Hour and co-founder of Stable Genius Productions. She also produces and hosts ZigZag, the business podcast about being human from TED.
Investigating how technology and business are transforming humanity is Manoush’s passion and expertise. Her book Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Creative Self (2017, St. Martin’s Press) and TED Talk (3.3m+ views) are guides to surviving the “Attention Economy.” She was one of Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in Business for 2018. Manoush created and hosted the podcast Note to Self from 2013-2020, in partnership with WNYC Studios. The Academy of Podcasters named Note to Self Best Tech Podcast of 2017. Manoush has received numerous awards for her work, including The Gracie in 2014 and 2018 for Best Radio Host and a Webby for Best Podcast Host in 2020.
About the book:
“With so many big questions stemming from my central quandary, I dived into trying to understand what happens when we constantly keep our brains busy and never give ourselves time to mentally meander. I spoke with neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists about ‘mind-wandering’—what our brains do when we’re doing nothing at all, or not fully focused on a task.
We may feel like we are doing very little when we endlessly fold laundry, but our brains are actually hard at work. When our minds wander, we activate something called the ‘default mode,’ the mental place where we solve problems and generate our best ideas, and engage in what’s known as ‘autobiographical planning,’ which is how we make sense of our world and our lives and set future goals. The default mode is also involved in how we try to understand and empathize with other people, and make moral judgments.
When we let ourselves space out and our mind wander, we do our most original thinking and problem solving; without distraction, your mind can go to some interesting and unexpected places. Creativity—no matter how you define or apply it—needs a push, and boredom, which allows new and different connections to form in our brain, is a most effective muse. […]
According to Dr. Jonathan Smallwood, professor of cognitive neuroscience and an expert in mind-wandering at the University of York, ‘In a very deep way, there’s a close link between originality and creativity and the spontaneous thoughts we generate when our minds are idle.’ In other words, you have to let yourself be bored to be brilliant.”
Have you ever thought that boredom can actually boost your creativity and change your life? Yep. That is what the book is about. As subtitle suggests “How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Creative Self “.
Once Manoush Zomorodi noticed that her best ideas came to her mind when she was strolling with a buggy. And was completely bored. What she has also observed is that one of the main obstacles in the way to getting bored (and brilliant) is…modern technology! So in 2015, Manoush, who was hosting WNYC’s popular podcast and radio show Note to Self, led tens of thousands of listeners through an experiment to help them unplug from their devices, get bored, jump-start their creativity, and change their lives. So Bored and Brilliant builds on that experiment (and insights from neuroscience) to show us how to rethink our gadget use to live better and smarter in this new digital ecosystem.
The book is brilliantly written, and if you listen to an audiobook (like I did), it’s simply amazing and really easy to digest. So I definitely recommend it to anyone who wants to understand how to tame the best of modern technology and become more productive and creative.
I especially liked Manoush’s insights on most of the tech-related issues that modern parents worry about: gaming, social media, digital reading, etc. The book is packed with brilliant ideas, and I can’t wait to share with you some of them.
Key insights:
Want to be creative? Get bored!
“You could say that boredom is an incubator lab for brilliance. It’s the messy, uncomfortable, confusing, frustrating place one has to occupy for a while before finally coming up with the winning equation or formula. This narrative has been repeated many, many times. The Hobbit was conceived when J.R.R. Tolkien, a professor at Oxford, ‘got an enormous pile of exam papers there and was marking school examinations in the summer time, which was very laborious, and unfortunately also boring.’ When he came upon one exam page a student had left blank, he was overjoyed. ‘Glorious! Nothing to read,’ Tolkien told the BBC in 1968. ‘So I scribbled on it, I can’t think why, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” And so, the opening line of one of the most beloved works of fantasy fiction was born. Steve Jobs, who changed the world with his popular vision of technology, famously said, ‘I’m a big believer in boredom. … All the [technology] stuff is wonderful, but having nothing to do can be wonderful, too.’ In a Wired piece by Steven Levy, the cofounder of Apple—nostalgic for the long, boring summers of his youth that stoked his curiosity because ‘out of curiosity comes everything’—expressed concern about the erosion of boredom from the kind of devices he helped create.”
Yep, boredom activates the imagination and fosters creativity. In the book, Manoush walks us through the brief history of boredom and shares three interesting facts:
- Boredom has pretty much always been there.
- Boredom serves an important evolutionary purpose.
- It activates “the default mode” of your brain (“the imagination network”) through which some of our best ideas appear.
When we get bored and can’t find any stimulation in our immediate surroundings, we turn inwards. Once we start daydreaming and allow our mind to wander, we start thinking beyond the conscious and into the subconscious. And that’s where all the creative thinking happens. How awesome is that?
By the way, have you ever noticed that children ask the best questions when they are bored (e.g. in a car, before falling asleep, while having breakfast)? So here is the thing – if we want to help our kids develop a super important creative thinking skill, we should let them be bored.
P.S.: to me, it resonates a lot with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of consciousness and attention in Flow – check out our notes for more.
Daydreaming and mind-wandering
“There are obviously different ways to daydream or mind-wander—and not all of them are productive or positive. In his seminal book The Inner World of Daydreaming, psychologist Jerome L. Singer, who has been studying mind-wandering for more than fifty years, identifies three different styles of daydreaming:
• poor attention control
• guilty-dysphoric
• positive-constructive”
When our minds wander, we activate the part of the brain that scientists call “the default mode network”, which is super important for us. However, not all types for mind-wandering are productive and lead to brilliance.
In a nutshell, sometimes we might just have “poor attention control”, totally unable to focus on anything. That is not productive and will not lead to brilliant ideas. Neither does the “guilty-dysphoric” daydreaming, when we, for example, ruminate on things and get stuck in a maze. The healthy default mode is called “positive-constructive” daydreaming, and we want to spend our time there:
“The flip side of dysphoric daydreaming, the positive-constructive kind, is when our thoughts veer toward the imaginative. We get excited about the possibilities that our brain can conjure up seemingly out of nowhere, like magic. This mode of mind-wandering reflects our internal drive to explore ideas and feelings, make plans, and problem solve.”
That’s when we do our “autobiographical planning”, integrate our sense of who we are and digest all the interpersonal and moral challenges we face. That’s like getting into the flow state. And if we don’t let our minds wander and do that integration, we will feel more stressed and emotionally exhausted (and we are not talking about any creativity here).
Question for you – how can YOU spend more time in positive-constructive daydreaming?
Technology is altering our minds
“Many of us who have observed our own behavior don’t need science to prove that technology is altering us, but let’s bring some in anyway. Dopamine, the neurotransmitter that records certain experiences in our brain (typically described as pleasurable) and prompts us to repeat them, plays a part not only in sex and drugs, but also the swiping and tapping we do on our smartphones.
Scott Barry Kaufman- scientific director of the Imagination Institute…gave me the straight dope on dopamine. “It’s a misconception that dopamine has to do with our feelings of happiness and pleasure,” he said. “It’s a molecule that helps influence our expectations.” Higher levels of dopamine are linked to being more open to new things and novelty seeking. Something novel could be an amazing idea for dinner or a new book. . . or just getting likes on a Facebook post or the ping of a text coming in. Our digital devices activate and hijack this dopamine system extremely well, when we let them.
[…] Kaufman calls dopamine “the mother of invention” and explains that because we have a limited amount of it, we must be judicious about choosing to spend it on “increasing our wonder and excitement for creating meaning and new things like art – or on Twitter.”
In short, smartphones hack our brains and help us develop habits that don’t serve us well. We train our brains to have one thumb on Instagram, Facebook, or emails so we can jump straight in if anything happens. Slowly technology takes over our mental space, leaving less and less for actual thinking and creativity. Actually, scientists say that social media profoundly impact our ability to use our executive functioning effectively.
So to unlearn these habits, we need to invite mindfulness into our lives and say: “Wait a minute, I don’t need more information to make sense out of whatever I’m doing. Let me stop and reflect.” Below are some practical ideas on how to do it.
Bored and Brilliant Program
“This is what the Bored and Brilliant project is all about: losing a little of the tools that give us a lot in the way of information, immediate productivity, and assurance in order to regain some of the simplicity and wonder that lead to deeper creativity, insight, and calm.”
There are seven steps in The Bored and Brilliant Program, designed to build our capacity for boredom by helping us understand our relationships with technology and how our brains and technology can conflict.
CHALLENGE ONE: Observe yourself. If you want to take control of something in your life, you have to start with tracking it (that also reminds me of Darren Hardy’s ideas in The Compound Effect). So track your digital habits from the moment you wake until you go to sleep. Manoush recommends using the Moment app (for Apple users) or the Break-free app (for Android users). Both of them are not available in 2022, but I’ve googled some other options for you: Space, Rescue Time, and Checky.
CHALLENGE TWO: Keep your devices out of reach while in motion. Don’t use your phone while you are in transit. That means doing nothing while on a bus, walking down the street, or driving.
CHALLENGE THREE: Photo-free day. “No pictures of food, kitten, kids – nada.”
CHALLENGE FOUR: Delete that app. Pick an app you can’t live without and simply delete it. Games, social media, whatever you spend most of your time on.
CHALLENGE FIVE: Take a fakecation. Unplug – disconnect from all the technology for a while (a day, an afternoon, an hour, or even 20 minutes – you decide). “You’ll be in the office, but out of touch.”
CHALLENGE SIX: Observe something else. Pay attention to everything around you and reclaim the art of noticing. Go somewhere public and stay for a while. Watch people, animals, birds, or whatever that strikes you.
CHALLENGE SEVEN: The Bored and Brilliant Challenge. Get bored! “Use your new powers of boredom to make sense of your life and set goals.” Manoush suggests three steps for the challenge: (1) Think about an aspect of your life that you’ve been confused by, procrastinating or even avoiding to think about. (2) Set aside thirty minutes where you’ll be totally free of distractions. Then either put “a generous pot” of water on the stove and watch it come to a boil or find a small piece of paper and write “1,0,1,0” as small as you can until there will be no more space. (3) Immediately after completing the boring task in step two, pick a pen and a notebook and put your mind to the task of solving the problem from step one.
Video games and our brain
“McGonigal’s big theory is that the “number-one indicator” of whether video games make a person’s life and mood better, or have a negative impact on them, is if the player “sees games as being meaningfully related to reality”.
“Are you a different person when you play? Are you in a different reality? She asked. If so, “then you tend to use them as a crutch and aren’t able to bridge the gap between a game world and your real-life challenges. So the worse real life gets, the more you play games, and then the more you play games, the more you avoid your problems in this downward spiral,” McGonigal said. “The challenge is to enjoy or identify with the actions in the game, so that when you stop playing, you continue to love and enjoy them”.”
Gaming is probably one of the hottest topics for parents (and not only!).
Jane McGonigal is a director of game research and development at the Institute for the Future in Paolo Alto. One of the questions she got interested in was: can video games help players cope with depression and anxiety? So as a scientist (and a gamer), Jane started to dig deeper. After going through almost five hundred peer-reviewed studies on how games affect real-life wellness, she found conflicting information. Half of the studies found that games led to depression, poor grades and anxiety, whereas the other half found the exact opposite.
As you can imagine, she tried to make sense of all these studies and came to a simple conclusion – if games change your identity and make you feel like you are in a different reality, then you are more likely to be in trouble. If you find a sweet spot where a game is more like meditation to calm down your brain, then your mental health can benefit from playing a video game. So here is the main tip:
“The idea is to play video games for “short bursts” in order to elevate one’s mood and level of physical energy and then “get back to your everyday life in a more positive way.”
So set the timer for 20 mins and enjoy ☺ Same for kids – the best strategy is to set the limit for playing video games. And, as Dr Peter Gray suggests in his fantastic book Free to Learn, make sure there are enough opportunities for your children to play freely with their friends.
And here is one more important tip from Jane McGonigal: never ever shame your children about the games they play. That means never saying, “Stop wasting your time and do something real”. Instead, try to engage with children about the game they are playing, asking questions like: “How you play it?”, “What is cool about this game?”, “What’s hard?”, “How did you get better at the game?” The main point is to help kids make the connection between what they do on the screen and real life (e.g. understanding how they can use abstract skills they are practising in the game at school).
P.S.: Jane has two fantastic TED talks – I definitely recommend them! She also developed a game that helps people improve mental health – SupperBetter. Check it out (and I can’t wait to read her book as well)!
P.P.S.: have you ever come across a “brain-training” game? Although it may sound tempting that playing a game can improve brain functioning, I was surprised to learn that the research suggests that they don’t do that…And guess what else is a big marketing fad? Baby Einstein videos. Yep. They are not educational. Surprised?
What do drug dealers and technologists have in common?
“Golden Krishna, an expert in user experience who currently works on design strategy at Google, astutely pointed out during one of our conversations that the only people who refer to their customers as “users” are drug dealers—and technologists.”
Yep. Because both things are addictive. And also, guess what? Most of the leaders and executives from tech giants like eBay, Google, Apple and Hewlett-Packard don’t let their own kids use the very gadgets and software they make! Even Steve Jobs put severe restrictions on his kids’ use of digital gadgets. That gives me goosebumps.
Books should never be replaced by digital text
“Despite the benefits of reading the old-fashioned way, as evidenced in Mangen’s study and many others like it, according to Wolf, the human brain is adapting almost too well to the particular attributes or characteristics of Internet reading. Basically, we are losing our ability to slow-read by giving up the practice of it. “That’s my real worry,” Wolf said. “I worry we will not use our most preciously acquired deep-reading processes because we’re just given too much stimulation.”
Manoush shares the results of an experiment where researchers asked half of the group to read a short story on a Kindle e-reader, and the other half read the paperback version. Once they finished, researchers asked them questions on plot chronology. And guess what? The Kindle readers performed much worse!
So that means that our brain is pretty good at skimming digital text, but deep-reading is more likely to happen when reading old good paper books. Ok, our generation grew up on paper books, and we’ve adapted to both by now. I personally had to train myself to read on Kindle, and must say it took me a while to reach the same comprehension as with paper books.
What about our kids? Here is a big idea:
“Despite the cost of printing and storing them, books should never be completely replaced by digital text. Resources permitting, every reader should strive for a mix of both paper and e-books. Start with paper, build that deep comprehension, and then transition to digital reading, while maintaining the ability to read difficult and longer texts – this is the next step in literacy.”
Question for you – how are your deep-reading skills? When was the last time you picked a paper book up?
P.S.: our friend, a professor of Applied Linguistics at Warsaw University, shared an interesting observation – most of her students nowadays struggle with processing a full-page assignment printed on an A4 page. It’s just too much for them! They give up quickly and complain that the task is too long and hard. But when she splits the same assignment into two separate tasks (by pretty much just cutting the A4 page in half), the students are ok with it!
Action steps for you:
- Think about your relationship with your phone – look at every app and ask yourself: “Is this product serving me or hurting me?”. Which apps can you delete?
- Let your child be bored – embrace the benefits of boredom, and whenever your child says, “I’m bored”, don’t rush to entertain him. Instead, fetch him some ideas on how to use boredom effectively.
- Try Bored and Brilliant Challenge for problem-solving or decision-making.
Quotes for the book:
