Can You REALLY Be Bored To Death?

Summary

The Rest Is Science — Episode Summary

Episode: Can You REALLY Be Bored To Death?
Hosts: Professor Hannah Fry & Michael Stevens (Vsauce)
Date: January 27, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this playful and deeply inquisitive episode, Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens tackle the commonly used phrase "bored to death." Diving into the science behind boredom, they ask: Can you actually be bored to the point of fatality? The episode explores what boredom is, the brain's response to it, how it’s studied, and whether boredom can be truly deadly — or if it's a form of cognitive suffering essential to the human condition.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. What is Boredom?

• Boredom is not just having nothing to do; it's the negative experience resulting from a frustrated desire for meaningful stimulation.
  • Quote — Hannah Fry [08:02]:
    "It has been described as a negative experience where the desire to engage in stimulating and satisfying activity is frustrated."
• There’s a distinction between boredom and relaxation. Relaxation is voluntary, sought out; boredom is forced, unwanted, and causes discomfort.
• Definition for maximum boredom (Hannah Fry, paraphrased [10:54]):
  1. Nothing new is happening
  2. Everything is fully expected
  3. The activity feels pointless

2. The Neuroscience of Boredom

• The brain is a "prediction machine," constantly seeking to process new information and validate expectations. When deprived, it grows restless or even distressed.
  • Quote — Hannah Fry [15:17]:
    "Our brains...are basically these prediction machines trying to work out what's going to happen next...and it feels happy when it gets the prediction correct and...dissatisfaction if it gets it wrong."
• Study with monkeys: Learned associations trigger dopamine release not when the reward comes but when it's predicted.
  • Ties in with the idea that when nothing novel happens, the brain’s reward system is starved.

3. Measuring and Studying Boredom

• In experiments, simply leaving people undisturbed leads them to self-entertain or nap. True boredom often requires putting people in situations where tasks are repetitive and meaningless.
• Michael’s “This Book Will Put You to Sleep” anecdote about failing to become bored revealed personal curiosity as an antidote to boredom.
  • Quote — Michael Stevens [11:12]:
    "I struggled to find something that was legitimately boring...as a content creator, I just keep reading this going, this is content."

4. Boredom as Motivation and Disgust

• Boredom is evolutionarily linked to disgust—both prompt withdrawal behavior: leave the current environment for better stimulation.
  • Quote — Michael Stevens [17:07]:
    "Disgust is...on the spectrum of approach and withdrawal...boredom motivates us to withdraw, to say, 'okay, I can't just sit in this chair, I'm going to pick up a magazine and read this.'"
• Mice, like humans, seek stimulation even when options are arbitrary (e.g., wild mice running on wheels in the forest [19:45]).

5. Boredom Under Extreme Conditions: Mars500 and Sensory Deprivation

• The Mars500 study involved 520 days of routine and confinement to simulate a Mars trip. The progression of boredom included emotional flatness, loss of curiosity, time distortion, and eventual physical lethargy.
  • Quote — Hannah Fry [22:34]:
    "Every day started so identical that he started deliberately misplacing objects just to have something to look for."
• In sensory deprivation research, hallucinations became common when stimulation was removed — brains began manufacturing their own experiences (squirrels in uniform, flying dogs).
  • Quote — Hannah Fry [32:12]:
    "When you deprive the brain of stimulation...it starts predicting things that aren't really there."
• Michael shares his own experience with voluntary isolation and a sensory deprivation tank — noting at first he could distinguish hallucinations, but over time the line blurred ([33:41]-[35:46]).
  • Quote — Michael Stevens [35:46]:
    "It got scary when I couldn't tell what was real and what wasn't...Dreams were the first things that I couldn't differentiate from reality."

6. Can Boredom Be Deadly?

• Boredom reduces brain activity, but not to life-threatening levels (only about a 5% drop).
  • Quote — Michael Stevens [28:02]:
    "When bored, brain activity decreases by about 5%. That's it. And then I was like, well, wait, brain activity is even lower in a coma, and yet people can survive those."
• However, indirect harm is possible:
  • Long-term sensory deprivation or solitary confinement causes brain atrophy and severe psychiatric effects (hallucinations, paranoia, panic, and even physical shrinking of parts of the brain, e.g., hippocampus [41:18]).
  • Civil service studies suggest chronic boredom correlates with shorter lifespans, though causation isn’t clear ([41:18-42:18]).

7. Boredom Drives Adaptation and Innovation

• Boredom serves as a vital motivator, prompting exploration, creativity, and human innovation.
• Michael: "You can't directly kill someone with boredom...but you can extinct a species with boredom...humans are here because we get bored and look at the universe and say, 'what else could there be?'" ([42:31]).
• Boredom is reframed as the root of human progress, curiosity, and scientific discovery.
  • Quote — Hannah Fry [43:15]:
    "Maybe boredom isn't the death of us. Maybe it's the birth of us. Maybe it's the whole reason why we're so successful."

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Michael Stevens, on the function of boredom [17:07]:
  "Disgust is the emotion associated with withdrawal...He put boredom on the same spoke as disgust, making boredom, in his opinion, a more diluted, weaker form of disgust."
• Hannah Fry, on sensory deprivation hallucinations [32:12]:
  "When you deprive the brain of stimulation...it starts predicting things that aren't really there."
• Michael Stevens, reflecting on isolation experience [35:46]:
  "It got scary when I couldn't tell what was real and what wasn't...Dreams were the first things that I couldn't differentiate from reality."
• Michael Stevens, on boredom and the human condition [42:31]:
  "You can't directly kill someone with boredom...but you can extinct a species with boredom. Humans are here because we get bored and look at the universe and say, 'what else could there be?' This is the way everything is, but what if it wasn't this way?"
• Hannah Fry, on the positive side of boredom [43:15]:
  "Maybe boredom isn't the death of us. Maybe it's the birth of us. Maybe it's the whole reason why we're so successful."
• Michael Stevens, closing remark/joke [45:47]:
  "Why can't you be like the philosophy department? All they need is paper and pencils."

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Defining and exploring boredom: [01:57] – [10:54]
• Boredom vs relaxation, personal experiences: [08:42] – [11:57]
• Why the brain hates boredom (the prediction machine & dopamine studies): [13:03] – [16:10]
• Evolutionary/animal boredom, wild mouse wheel study and Mars500: [19:03] – [22:49]
• Mars500 boredom scale and coping strategies: [22:49] – [24:52]
• Self-harm as boredom relief (shocking experiment, gender differences): [23:13] – [24:52]
• Experiments with sensory deprivation and the limits of endurance: [29:07] – [33:41]
• Michael’s personal isolation/sensory deprivation experience: [33:41] – [37:47]
• Boredom’s effects in solitary confinement: [39:14] – [41:18]
• Long-term harm—can boredom kill?: [41:18] – [42:18]
• Boredom as an evolutionary driver / philosophical implications: [42:30] – [45:37]
• Science as the natural extension of human boredom: [45:04] – [45:37]

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Final Takeaways

• You cannot literally die from boredom, but extended periods of profound sensory deprivation can be profoundly unhealthy, and chronic boredom may be associated with physical and psychological harm.
• Boredom is an adaptive, sometimes uncomfortable, but ultimately life-enhancing force — driving humans to invent, explore, and create.
• Rather than seeking to banish boredom, we might recognize it as the spark for curiosity, innovation, and, in a sense, the very essence of science.

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Born to be bored—born to ask questions.

Transcript

[A]

Foreign. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research uk.

[B]

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[A]

But maybe it should be, because it is incredibly rare for them to develop cancer, which could be partly down to their unique immune system, or it might be the way that their cells respond to damage. So.

[B]

So scientists are studying their biology for its cancer fighting secrets. It's a reminder that discoveries can sometimes come from places you don't expect.

[A]

Cancer Research UK is the world's largest charitable funder of cancer research. Thousands of scientists, of doctors and nurses work across more than 20 countries to help turn discoveries in the lab into new tests, new treatments and new innovations.

[B]

And the impact is clear. Over the past 50 years, the charity's pioneering work has helped double cancer survival in the uk, meaning more people living longer, better lives, free from the fear of cancer.

[A]

For more information about Cancer Research uk, their research, their breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org restiscience.

[B]

Hello, I'm Michael Stevens.

[A]

And I'm Hannah Fry. Welcome to the Rest Is Science. You know that phrase, Michael, bored to death?

[B]

I do.

[A]

I mean, phrases like that, there's, there tends to be something behind them. So what I thought we could do today is investigate that. Do you think, do you think you actually can be bored to death?

[B]

Ooh, I hope so. And I hope that we do it today. Get ready for the most boring episode ever.

[A]

That's quite a big, bold promise. If you're driving, if you are operating heavy machinery or doing anything other frankly, than, than about to go to sleep, then maybe we should come with a warning.

[B]

You've been warned.

[A]

But that's what we're doing today. We are asking, can your brain be bored to death? We're asking, what is it scientifically and why does your brain hate it so much?

[B]

I have a feeling the answer is no, at least not directly. But I think that this journey is going to be a fun one because we need to define boredom and I think we should start by talking about how bored we both feel right now.

[A]

I mean, right now. I'll be honest with you, my brain is absolutely brimming with all of the excellent boredom related facts that I have been looking up, all of the astonishing little stories that I want to bring to you. So I, I don't, I feel quite the opposite of board right now.

[B]

Yeah, no, I feel the same way and I think that that is one of those great, like, ironies that boredom is actually really fascinating.

[A]

Do you, do you sometimes crave boredom? I mean, you're a busy man, right?

[B]

Yeah, but I do crave having nothing to do, because that's where I'm a Viking in my own mind, just alone with myself.

[A]

Is it that you actually want nothing to do or do you just want no responsibility?

[B]

I want nothing to do, but I like the responsibility. Have you heard about this study that looked at what the best age to.

[A]

Be is, by what metric?

[B]

Okay, so you just ask people, you ask people throughout all their life stages of all ages, like, what age were you the happiest at? You know, you ask really old people, you ask people who still have a lot of life to live. And I promise this is related to boredom. Eventually I want to hear it. The answer is 38. Oh, hello, this is Michael and Hannah. A few days after recording this episode, I realized afterwards that I said everyone's favorite age to be was 38. That's not correct. The study found that it was 36. So this is a correction. From now on in the episode, when we say 38, just think 36.

[A]

And. And if you are 38 or 37, in fact, I'm sorry that this, well, news will come as a shock to you, but your. Your best days are behind you.

[B]

You missed it. That is consistently the average age of highest happiness. And one of the hypothesis is for why is that? It's when you feel that you have the greatest meaning and purpose, you have the most responsibilities, right? Whether it be with your family, with children, or with work, you're very relevant to the world. And.

[A]

And it's.

[B]

It's not the most fun. It's not when people said they had the most fun. It's when they felt the happiest and the most needed. When you're young, you're kind of like, I'm here, everyone's caring for me. And when you're old, you're here, everyone's caring for you. But in the middle, if you don't get up in time and bring your kid to school, it's your fault. Everyone's relying on you. And so later on you look back and go, that's when I really mattered.

[A]

You know? You know what's crazy, what's really interesting about that is that because there's different ways that you can measure happiness, right? There's sort of the experiential measurement of it. It's like, how happy are you right now in this moment? Give me a metric or give me a score out of 10, for instance. But then there's also this sort of reflective version of happiness.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

How did you feel? How do you feel about your life? So I haven't actually seen that study. Like, I think that's really fascinating that you ask people, when were you happiest? And on a. In a reflective way, they say 38. Because when you ask people, how happy are you right now? It's exactly the opposite result. Like, the least happy that you are is about the age 40, which for exactly the same reasons is that you are, like, swallowed up by responsibilities. A lot of people have both young children and old parents simultaneously, and they're still trying to build their career, and they're still trying to pay for their house. You are definitely not bored.

[B]

Exactly. Exactly. And so boredom and stress and anxiety have this weird opposite relationship later on. At the time, contemporaneously you're unhappy, but then later on you go, man, that's the happiest I ever was.

[A]

Okay, well, I think it only seems right to start off with what on earth boredom actually is. How the hell do you even study it? I mean, do you just put people in a room and not let anything happen?

[B]

Yeah, no, you actually. That is what you do. Or you. You have them sit down and do something that's really repetitive and meaningless.

[A]

Is meaningless part of it, then?

[B]

Yeah, that's a. That's a part of it. Because if. If people feel like they're doing a task in a laboratory, like, say, sorting shapes or solving problems, and that maybe there's, like, a competitive nature and they want to impress the researchers or beat their own personal records, that's. There's too much meaning there. It needs to feel like, man, this is dumb. Like, you can tell people that they're just helping calibrate the machine before the actual test begins. And that is much more boring because they feel like it doesn't matter. It's just for the machine. It's to, like, warm up the mouse or whatever. Those are great. If you let people just sit with nothing to do, they can often entertain themselves quite a bit. And often subjects will just take a nap. So you need to make sure that they don't relax. You have to. You have to make sure that they're. They're in that, like, uncomfortable zone of I'm bored and I can't escape.

[A]

That's an interesting thought. The idea that if you're sat alone in a chair with nothing to entertain you, you can quite easily. I'm thinking here about kids who fidget in their chairs or, like, wiggle their feet or kind of pull their hair just to sort of have some kind of sensory input that's kind of continually there.

[B]

That's right, yeah. And I think that we're going to keep stumbling into this as we try to kill people with boredom. We're going to find that the body heals from boredom just like a cut heals through platelets and, and whatnot. When you're bored, your brain goes nap. Not going to do this. We need the stimulation, and you come up with ways to entertain yourself.

[A]

If we're going to bore people, we're going to make this the most boring podcast of all time. You have to sit. You're not allowed to fall asleep. You're not allowed to wiggle. You're not allowed to jiggle your feet. No twiddling your thumbs, no playing with your hair. You've just got to sit. What happens when you do that? When you put people in those kind of passive waiting conditions, they don't die.

[B]

So we're not quite there yet.

[A]

No.

[B]

But they do become anxious or I think they actually become a little bit disgusted.

[A]

It has been described as a negative experience. Agree. Where the desire to engage in stimulating and satisfying activity is frustrated. That's quite key, actually, I think, because there's definitely been moments in my life when I've been particularly busy where the thought of, like, sitting in a chair and not doing anything would actually be quite appealing.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

This, this, this definition being like you're. You're not allowed to do something. Frustration of not. Of wanting to be stimulated and not able to be. Researchers believe it contains an emotional element characterized by a lack of pleasure or meaning.

[B]

Yeah. You know what? I'm seeing kind of two things here. There's relaxing and then there's boring.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So the producers, of course, are always telling us to make the show more interesting. And I hate being told what to do. And so boredom is the topic. Today. I brought this book. It's literally called this book will put you to sleep.

[A]

Amazing.

[B]

And so, fair warning, if you're driving listening to this podcast, watch out. This book is made to be as boring as possible, and it's good for reading before you go to bed. It's got, for example, a bunch of clocks. What time is it? And it's just a bunch of little clip art pictures of clocks that you can look at.

[A]

Is there any pattern to the, to the times across the different clocks?

[B]

Yeah, they're all just like one minute ahead of each other. So it's, it's really. Here's a staring contest with 48 cats. You can just stare at them and see who first.

[A]

Amazing.

[B]

This one is a taxonomy of micro moths. And it's just the most boring description of small moths. And they use a lot of scientific Latin phrases.

[A]

I've got an actually surprisingly high threshold.

[B]

I know, and that's what I've noticed too. I cannot get bored by this, like, even this bit about micro moths. I'll read you the first couple of sentences. The Microlepidoptera micro moths are a non monophyletic group of families of moth, as it is a non monophyletic group. Micro moth enthusiasts generally use the property of smallness as a way of identifying micro moths. Moths with a wingspan of less than 20 millimeters qualify as micro moths. And it goes on and on like that. And then I keep going, oh, my gosh, there's a. There's a definition of what a micro moth is. And then it talks about how it's hard to identify them because you can't see the differences on their wings because they're too small. And then I wind up staying up all night reading the book that's supposed to put me to sleep.

[A]

Maybe you're immune. Maybe you're immune from boredom.

[B]

Maybe. But I think that this is getting at two different things. One is I want to relax my brain and be distracted from all the things that I'm thinking about so I can sleep. And then there's, I want to do stuff, but I can't because I'm in a waiting room at the dentist's office and I'm bored. Bored. Negative experience. And it is an emotion that motivates us to move away, to find something new and different.

[A]

So here's another nice definition. A situation becomes maximally boring when it combines three factors. One, nothing new is happening. Everything is fully expected, and the activity feels pointless. Which makes me think, frankly, your book is out. That was. It failed on all three counts.

[B]

Yeah, it's not pointless. It really fails that third one for a lot of reasons. One is just that I find micro moths interesting, I guess, but also because as like a content creator, I just keep reading this going, this is content. Like, I've already made a YouTube short about this book and I struggled to find something that was legitimately boring. Like, there's one that's. It's called A Few Facts about Minor Belgian Politicians. And they talk about, like, who was the deputy prime minister for a couple of months in this interim period in the 2000s. And I'm just like, I want to Wikipedia this person what an interesting minor position to have. But that's because I'm always thinking about how do I get views on this? And there's always a way.

[A]

Yeah, right.

[B]

But, but what would be boring to me is something that's pointless. And that gets to that frustration definition that you brought up. The feeling of I'm being stopped from activities that I would rather be doing.

[A]

I tell you what is interesting about this though, is that we all know this, this, this experience we've all like can completely connect with the idea of sitting in the dentist feeling frustrated. But it is interesting that there is something going on in our brains that does react so viscerally to these kind of situations. New is happening where everything is fully expected and where the activity feels pointless. And the thing, I think part of the reason for this is that our brains, and I think this is increasingly the, the, the sort of view of scientists is that our brains are basically these prediction machines trying to work out what's going to happen next with reality. Predict it and then it feels happy when it gets the prediction correct and sort of gets a little bit of jolt dissatisfaction if it gets it wrong. You can notice this really clearly if you ever try and step off of a static escalator. You know that experience that I'm talking about here?

[B]

Oh yeah. I think it's called the elevator effect. Like it's a whole thing with the name. Yeah.

[A]

Where you. Wait, Escalator effect. No.

[B]

What did I say? Elevator.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

Ah, see, I'm just keeping on your toes. Yeah.

[A]

Not boring. Everything wasn't fully expected.

[B]

Effect. Yeah. That's when you step off an escalator or when you, when you step onto an escalator that is off.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

And you feel like you're losing your balance.

[A]

Yeah. And it's because your brain is making a prediction that it's then getting wrong. There was this really incredible study with monkeys. It's like one of the most important science papers, neuroscience papers, certainly one of my favorites, let me put it that way. Where they were monitoring the neurons in the brains of monkeys. They had these really unbelievably fine wires that were basically eavesdropping on what these neurons were doing in the monkey's brain. And they were, the monkeys were part of this experiment where they were kind of doing like Pavlov's dog. Right. So the monkeys would get this little drop of juice, which it really loved, and a light would come on in advance of the juice and what they were looking at in the brain for when the spike of dopamine might happen. So you would expect, if the monkey loves the juice, that the spike of dopamine would happen when the juice arrived. Right. And that is what happened initially. The monkey drinks the juice, the dopamine spike's done. After a while, the monkey learns that the light comes on the before the juice arrives. Now what's interesting is that when the monkey actually gets the juice, then it's like, okay, cool, I was sort of expecting that, you know, that's absolutely fine. If, however, you decide to not give the monkey the juice, it's predicted it's about to get some, and then the juice never arrives. The monkey is pissed, the monkey does not like that at all. But the other way around, if you don't put the light on and then you just give the monkey the juice, so it's not predicting it. And then the juice arrives, it's even more happy than it would be if it was predicting something. If you put that another way, I always think of this as like, okay, if I'm walking down the street and I unexpectedly stumble across £20, it makes me way, way, way happier to have found this unexpected 20 pounds that I didn't predict than if somebody, a friend of mine, who owes me £20, gives me the £20. It's like, yeah, cool, thank you very much. I knew that was coming. I appreciate it. When you are like predicting the world and something better than predicted happens, your brain is like super excited about it. And likewise, the reverse, if you predict that something good is going to happen and it doesn't, your brain is extremely unhappy. But this is like one of the pieces of evidence that we have, and there's a whole, you could do many episodes on just this about the fact that the way that our brain works essentially is that it is assessing the sensory inputs, it is going through all of the information that is coming in, it's making predictions, predictions about what is going to happen next. And then it is rewarding itself based on whether those predictions turn out to be true. And so in a situation where nothing new is happening, where everything is fully expected, both of those situations basically mean that the brain is starved of the opportunity to make predictions.

[B]

Yeah, I love that they used monkeys and did it so methodically in a laboratory because it's something that is very relatable to our day to day experiences. And it really shows how deep of an evolutionary process this is, this need for enrichment and for cognitive stimulation that we need to exercise that, and we literally do in order to keep brain cells alive and help them keep Strong connections. And I don't think we see this in all living organisms, but once you get into warm blooded ones, once you get into mammals, they really need that cognitive stimulation. When you deny it to them, they feel disgusted in a way and they seek out other places and things and, and thoughts.

[A]

You said that boredom was like disgust though. Do you see, wait, one, how, and two, is that universal across animals?

[B]

Disgust is, is universal. It is one of the first things you see in a life form because what it is is that it's on the spectrum of approach and withdrawal. Right? That's a thing that not all life forms, the earliest ones just, they just existed. But one of the first behaviors you see in an organism through, through increasing complexity is suddenly an interest in approaching certain things and withdrawing from other things. And disgust is the emotion associated with withdrawal. And so Plutchuk on his famous wheel of emotions, which, if you want to just have a great time looking at how emotions might be related, look, look up Plutchk's emotion wheel. He put boredom on the same spoke as disgust, making boredom, in his opinion, a more diluted, weaker form of disgust. Because ultimately boredom motivates us to withdraw, to say, okay, I can't just sit in this chair, I'm going to pick up a magazine and read this while I wait for the doctor. I've got to change the environment. And it's different than curiosity where you wonder about something and you're looking for knowledge and you approach it. It's instead you're actually withdrawing to whatever necessary. Like if I'm bored and I just start like tapping with the pencil, I'm not curious about the pencil's properties. I'm disgusted by the lack of anything stimulating me and so I start doing this.

[A]

But then actually if you consider that in an environment where you have a bit more freedom. Right, so, so maybe not dentist chairs, because I don't think I past was like had dentists particularly in mind. But if you do find yourself in an environment where there is nothing new, where everything is fully expected and the activity feels pointless, I mean, those three kind of definitions again, then it's like, well, yeah, you are, you probably do need to get up and go away and move somewhere else. You probably do need some kind of emotion that motivates you to find a better environment.

[B]

That's right. And before we go to Mars, I just want to say one more thing that is related to this feeling of how deep it is. Your monkey study reminds me of some studies that were done on mice. We all are familiar with the little wheels that we put in mouse cages or rat cages, gerbils, and they run on them. And a lot of us think that we put those in there because they lack in a cage the enrichment they would normally get, the, the exercise they would normally get out in the wild. Right. But some researchers questioned that and they decided to put mouse wheels out in the woods. They just put, and they put cameras in the woods pointed at these mouse wheels. And sure enough, mice loved them.

[A]

Wild mice.

[B]

Wild mice love to run in circles, going nowhere on a mouse wheel. You put it out, you know, in the middle of the forest and they're like, yeah, finally I can run and not go anywhere. Because the mammalian brain, the warm blooded brain, craves stimulation. And I think that in a lot of ways the Internet is a mouse wheel in the wild. I've got this whole wide world in front of me, and yet I would rather run on a mouse wheel just like a real mouse. It is deep within us this distaste.

[A]

For boredom, but then also this very easy, distilled, original way to entertain yourself, I guess, both the wheel and the Internet.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

You know, actually, so that thing about mice running around in wheels and cages and then there's analogies between humans and animals. I think there's a really interesting experiment that has happened. It's called the Mars 500 project. This is basically, people are wondering about whether it will be possible to do a human led mission to Mars. But if you do so, it's going to take a long time to get to Mars. And so we have to run not just experiments about the physics of rockets and spaceships, but also the psychological experiments of what it means for a small group of people to be confined in what is, you know, effectively little bigger than a hamster or a mouse cage for a really, really long period of time. So what they've done, they ran this, this European simulation in Moscow. They called Mars500. They had six volunteers, three Russians, one Frenchman, one Italian, Colombian and one Chinese person. And they spent 520 days in this environment. It was, there was strict confinement, limited social contact. They were in the same room, same surroundings. They're like unbelievably routine schedules that didn't sort of change. No light, you know, no sort of external sounds, anything like that. And initially people were all right about it, like they were okay. Initially, they decided to create a boredom scale just to see how people were handling it. And it went from emotional flatness was sort of the first step on this boredom ladder, as it were, kind of do you feel a bit indifferent about what happens today all the way through to sort of loss of curiosity, which is currently be bothered to do anything at all? To time distortion? Does today feel like it's lasted much longer than it, than it should do or would do through to social weariness? Would you prefer to avoid everyone else? And then to actual physical lethargy? Like do you feel physically slow even after you've rested? They really, by the time it got to two thirds of the way through, they were really, really, really struggling. One crew member said that every day started so identical that he started deliberately misplacing objects just to have something to look for. They also, they had a treadmill. I mean sort of the human version of the mouse wheel. A treadmill schedule that was so rigid that one of them said that they could tell the time by the sound of the other person's footsteps.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

I mean they really, it was, I think, not fun. They just did not enjoy it.

[B]

I love that little trick, that little life hack of deliberately misplacing things just to give yourself something to do. Because that is what we find. And this goes back to the body's self healing boredom avoidance abilities. If you makes people really bored, they would rather hurt themselves than continue to be bored.

[A]

Go on.

[B]

In the experiment, you show participants a button that if they push will administer an electric shock. Like the button is metal and when they push it they get this very uncomfortable, but, you know, not dangerous shock.

[A]

And presumably these are people who don't want to be shocked.

[B]

Yeah. And people don't want this. They don't like it. You can even some people will try it and they'll be like, oh gosh, yeah, I hate that. And then you tell them, okay, cool. Well, anyway, the receptionist will come in when we're ready for the real study and you leave them all alone in a waiting room with nothing to do but the button to look at. They don't look at it for long. The majority of people, after you make them wait long enough, I'm talking like up to 30 minutes, an hour, they'll eventually push it again and then they'll do it again and they'll keep doing it because they would rather be in pain than do nothing and wait.

[A]

Can I tell you my favorite thing this particular story? My favourite thing about this is that there is a gender split in how people respond to this button. So you are right. 67% of men will choose to shock themselves at least once. One man pressed the shock button nearly 200 times during this experiment, but only 25% of women, only 25% of women. I have no idea what that means. I'm not sure. I'm not sure what that tells us a lot.

[B]

I think that means a lot about how our culture, how we're like a cultured to act. Yeah. I don't know what to say, but there's so much more that could be researched. I want to bring back another season of Minefield and we should look into this. Like, what kind, what do we, what do you learn about someone based on how quickly they decide to ease the boredom with some pain?

[A]

Okay. Well, so far I think we haven't done very well at either boring our listeners to death or working out whether it is possible to bore people to death. But we're going to do better in the second half. You can come back where we are going to talk about the extreme effects that can happen when boredom goes.

[B]

Yeah, things are gonna get a lot more boring. Stay tuned. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK, who over the past 50 years have helped double cancer survival in the UK.

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[B]

All right, so welcome back. We are discussing how to kill a person with boredom, and we haven't gotten any closer to an answer, and I'm not feeling optimistic. Hannah. I did some research. I found when bored brain activity decreases by about 5%. That's it.

[A]

Oh.

[B]

And then I was like, well, wait, brain activity is even lower in a coma, and yet people can survive those they're living during them. I'm just wondering, if boredom is not directly lethal, our only hope is that it might be indirectly lethal.

[A]

Right. I would say don't try killing someone with boredom at home, but, I mean, if it's unsuccessful, then maybe you can. Maybe it's absolutely fine.

[B]

What kind of consequences can happen when people get really bored?

[A]

Like, beyond just a little bit bored in a dentist's office? Yeah, it can be so much worse than the things that we're describing, because the thing about that Mars experiment even is that there were six of them. They had, like, tasks to do. They were able to talk to ground control, sort of simulated ground control. There were things to keep them occupied. Plus also the entire way through. Just go back to that definition. The activity didn't feel pointless. It felt like they were taking part in an experiment that. That would, you know, assist in the future of humanity and space exploration.

[B]

Yeah, it was. It was monotonous but meaningful. And they had hope.

[A]

Exactly. Exactly right. But there have been some experiments into really, really low stimulation environments and the effect that that has on us. One of the first ones came from university. This is like the 50s and the 60s. And it starts off and you're like, oh, this kind of sounds like quite a fun little experiment. You know, the sort of psychology studies that they do that are kind of cute and interesting. So they got 22 students. They. They paid them $20 a day in 1950, which is substantial, like, enough to be a genuine motivator. And they asked them to stay in this cubicle. They gave them these goggles that were, like, fogged, so there wasn't really any sort of visual input to their brain. They had aircon on at this constant low level noise. They couldn't really hear anything and they had to wear cotton gloves so they couldn't sort of touch anything. And they just had to stay there and that was it. And they could leave at any time that they wanted to and they just had to stay. And every day that they stayed, they were paid $20. Right. That's sort of a pretty simple experiment set up. How long do you. Do you want to guess how long people lasted for 20 bucks a day? In today's money, we're talking about 300 bucks.

[B]

300 bucks a day, which is.

[A]

I mean, it's not a fortune, but it's like it's a motivator, isn't it?

[B]

Yeah. Yeah.

[A]

Especially if you're a student.

[B]

Oh, man. Well, see, okay. It's hard for me to guess what a normal person would do because I have done isolation.

[A]

Oh, yeah.

[B]

In that same Minefield episode where we made people bored and got them to shock themselves, I put myself in a room where the lights never turned off and there was constant noise and my food was just all pre made shakes and I couldn't leave for three days.

[A]

How was it?

[B]

And it was. The way I put it is that I have like no memories of it happening really. But so it. It feels like it lasted like a split second in my memory. And yet while I was there, it felt like there was no time. I mean, the lights didn't even go off. I didn't know what time it was. And three days is a long time. And that was so weird and uncomfortable, especially at first that even if you were paying me 300 bucks a day worth it now I was able to do it because it was my job, was important for the show. And there were like a dozen jobs that depended on me doing this.

[A]

Yeah. Purpose.

[B]

And I didn't have anything else I could be doing. It wasn't like, oh, man, I could be, you know, organizing my garage or whatever. So that made it feel meaningful. And so I got through it. But if it was just an elective voluntary study for 300 a day, I. I don't think people could do it for like a week. I think they'd eventually say, no, I'd rather not have 300 bucks today.

[A]

You are absolutely right. So incredibly, very similar to your timescale. So most people lasted about two and a half days. So got out after, got out before three. No one made it past six. No one made it to a week.

[B]

I want to meet the person who went six days.

[A]

I know these Are probably like a hundred now.

[B]

Yeah, I want to know what their personality is that they stuck it out like, what, What a warrior.

[A]

What a warrior. And the thing is, is that, like, okay, so in the beginning, they, they, they were bored. They would sing songs, they would, you know, do mental arithmetic, they would, you know, recite poetry, whatever it was. But really soon their minds actually started to fracture under this monotony. And when you deprive the brain of stimulation, when you deprive it of its opportunity to make predictions, it starts predicting things that aren't really there. So essentially, hallucinations start to creep in. So one of the participants saw this parade of squirrels marching in uniform past him. Another one saw a flying dog. Lots of them saw sort of faces, geometrical shapes that appeared, that felt really vivid. Now, the people who did this experiment, Hebb was the scientist, they were really concerned by this. They were like, oh, gosh, we thought this was just a cute little study. And like, and all of a sudden it' gone really dark. So he stopped the work. But the military were like, ah, this is. There's potential here. That deprivation could really destabilize a person's sense of self, like, incredibly quickly. And so intelligence agencies on both sides of the Atlantic, including the CIA's MK Ultra program. I don't know if you've come across this, but that is a wild story which you can hear about on. The rest is classified. We'll put a link in the description of this. And I don't know whether that matches with your experience. I mean, did it feel like that? Did you feel like you were fragmenting your sense of self?

[B]

Yeah. So let me tell you, okay, so the room was completely white. There were no books, there was nothing to do. At one point, I balled up my socks and I was throwing them against the wall. And I said, no, I gotta stop, because this is a game. This is stimulation. I just want to stare at the wall for three days. And I did. And the way you've put it as a kind of prediction engine gone wild is a great way to describe it because I started to. I knew they weren't real at first. I started to remember the way things tended to go when I was a kid in. In class. And so it was. It was like a memory. It was like I was remembering an event or like a scene in a movie. And it would be a teacher, my fifth grade teacher talking to us. And then suddenly, like that one kid who always had a smart aleck thing to say would say something. And then that girl would say something. And this was happening in my head, like voices in my head. I knew it wasn't real, but it was like my brain was rehearsing some of its prediction engines that it had had for decades. And it was kind of amusing. It got scary when I couldn't tell what was real and what wasn't. And that was, I think, after about two, two and a half days, especially dreams. Dreams were the first things that I couldn't differentiate from reality. And so I would dream. I dreamt that the experiment was over and that the producers had come in and my wife was there. And then I woke up and they. It just felt like they'd walked out. And so I thought, why am I here alone? And I opened the door thinking it was over. They were just in here, but it was dark out there. And I just went back into the room and thought, I don't think the experiment's over. But I can't tell. The only hope I had that kept me going was knowing that they were not going to leave me in there for more than 72 hours because we'd rented the space for three days and the last thing the production company was going to do is waste money. And so their financial incentive was all I had to keep me in that room. Otherwise I would have said, I don't know what's going on, I might be here forever.

[A]

This is so extraordinary.

[B]

And so I don't want to get into it, but it's really encouraged me to think about the emergence of consciousness and sentience in humans and the. The ancient stories of hearing voices and having prophetic dreams. I think it really is a deep thing that we can all tap into. And so I would recommend that everyone try some form of. Of intense, prolonged isolation. Because you learn so much about yourself when there's nothing else but your own mind around you.

[A]

Because this is the idea behind sensory deprivation tanks, isn't it? I mean, there was. I feel like this is about the seventh time that I've mentioned Feynman on this show. We should do an episode on Feynman and what a problematic character he was. But he, he really loved going in sensory deprivation tanks, which I've never managed to try for exactly this reason that essentially your brain very, very, very quickly starts to hallucinate. And he felt that he could explore the boundaries of what the sort of mechanics of his brain was doing. But in it didn't involve taking hallucinogens or mind altering, you know, mind altering drugs that might have a longer lasting, more permanent effect.

[B]

That's Right. Yeah.

[A]

The.

[B]

The. The therapeutic and the psychonautical powers of isolation can be explored with sensory deprivation tanks. And I did one of those, too, in preparation for the isolation room, and it helped a lot. A sensory deprivation tank is built to deprive you of any sensory information. You float in water saturated with Epsom salt. So you are neutrally buoyant, and you don't sink, you don't have to swim, you're just there. And the water is at just the right temperature to be in equilibrium with the heat your body releases, so you feel no temperature. You're also sealed in a chamber that's completely dark and completely soundproof. So there's just nothing coming in any of your holes. You're just there with nothing but your own thoughts to happen. And you can do it for 30 minutes at a time, an hour, many hours. But that allowed me to become more comfortable being alone with just my thoughts to entertain me. And that really made isolation, or at least the first day of it, much easier.

[A]

How many times did you do the deprivation tank?

[B]

Just once.

[A]

How quickly did you start to see things that weren't necessarily there?

[B]

Really quickly, because it feels like there's images in front of your eyes right away. And I want to make it clear that it's a hallucination, but it's not like you think it's actually there. Right. I didn't think, oh, my gosh, like, these dancing colors and these lines are actually real. I knew they weren't. I was fascinated by why my brain was making them. And if I concentrated too much on them, they went away. It was. It was not as powerful as I would have liked. Right. It wasn't like a psychoactive drug, but it was much safer.

[A]

But here's the thing. It's like, I mean, this isn't, you know, the same as having a mental health episode. This isn't. This isn't like you say, psychoactive drugs, which is where the molecules in your brain are sort of rearranging and you can't tell what's real anymore. This is. This is also not that boredom drives people mad. It's that your brain needs noise in order to stay sane.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't drive you mad. You were already mad. And it's reality around us that keeps us sane. And when you remove that, that the brain goes, I'm on my own. This is what I'm really like. And you learn a lot about yourself. And so killing someone with boredom is. It almost feels like the opposite is what's going to really Happen, you will make the person become born again as their true self.

[A]

Well, I think that there are limits to this though, right, because those experiments about, you know, sensory deprivation from the 1950s, there are more extreme versions of this, of course, because there are prisoners who are held in long term solitary confinement. So in 1983, there was a psychiatrist, Stuart Grassian, who went and conducted some clinical interviews with 14 different inmates who had been held in these really small bare cells, like sort of, you know, 8 by 10ft, you know, not, you know, not these, you can't sort of exercise in them. For example, almost no human contact. Meals are passed through a slot in the door. The lights are on around the clock. Very similar to the environment that you found yourself in. No conversation, no books, no radio, and no sensory inputs, basically. I mean, they could occasionally hear the clank of metal doors down the corridor and like occasionally people screaming or whatever, but that was it. And sometimes these people had been in there for years at a time. And I think that this is it. It's like, you know, your experience of three days, how incredibly, how quickly your grip on reality was like, was shifting. But that was a situation where you had purpose, you had an ending, you didn't have hopelessness, you know, that was just that nothing new was happening and everything was fully expected. Whereas this is sort of a much more extreme version for a much longer period of time. And what they found was that, okay, yes, of course these people had hallucinations, they had paranoia, they had panic, they had all of these different kind of things. One person said, I feel like I'm dissolved in. Which is like a really horrifying thought. But actually, in particular, when they looked at the brains of people in this experiment and in subsequent studies of people who have been subjected to long term solitary confinement, we now know that it shrinks the hippocampus, that it reduces the activity in the prefrontal cortex, that once you deprive your brain of noise and stimulation, it actually starts, starts to atrophy.

[B]

Yeah. And so maybe you cannot kill someone with boredom directly, but indirectly you can cause a lot of harm. And I don't know, maybe you can indirectly kill someone with boredom. Because there have been studies on civil servants who reported being very bored at their jobs. When they were studied for a long time, it was found that they did die younger. Now, the direction of, of causation isn't really known here. Could it be that they were already going to die sooner and that led them to have more experiences of boredom for some related reason? Or was the boredom itself just reason for their brains to atrophy and give up.

[A]

Yeah, but I mean, when you put all of the different pieces together, it does definitely sound as though a sort of rich, interesting, like, varied environment is the thing that our brains are not just sort of designed for, for, but also craving and actively seeking out all of the time.

[B]

Okay, so maybe the answer to my original question, how do you directly kill someone with boredom? Is that you can't. Except you can extinct a species with boredom.

[A]

Go on.

[B]

I think humans are here and I think a lot of other warm blooded mammalian animals are here because we get bored and we look at the universe and we say, all right, but what else could there be? This is the way everything is. But what if it wasn't this way? And that's how humans decided, okay, look, it's too cold here, but, like, maybe I could play around with some of these fibers. Maybe I could play around with the part of this animal I can't digest and, like, invent shirts and coats and now I can live here. It was boredom that drove those innovations that allowed us to live everywhere. Alligators can't do that. And they don't do it, and they.

[A]

Won'T do it because they're not driven by boredom to find something else.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

Hey, maybe boredom isn't the death of us. Maybe it's the birth of us. Maybe it's the whole reason why we're so successful. So in that case, then it shouldn't be bored to death. It should be bored to being alive and successful.

[B]

It's not. Yeah, it's not being bored to death, it's being bored to being alive.

[A]

Yeah. Or maybe born to be bored.

[B]

Born to be bored.

[A]

Born to be bored. I'm getting, I'm putting in an order right now for the T shirt that you're inevitably going to bring out.

[B]

Good. Yeah, you'll get the first one. Schopenhauer thought this was really curious. He thought, shouldn't the world be enough? The existence of boredom showed that there was something wrong with being with existence itself, that we can't just be okay with it. And this bothered him his whole life. And on the other side, other philosophers said that it was a sign that humans were sublime. The fact that, like, a grasshopper can just, like, do nothing and not seemingly be worried about it, and yet we do shows that we must be greater than this world, that we're above and beyond it. And I think the answer is somewhere in between. I think humans and a lot of, like, any kind of warm blooded animal. It really needs to solve puzzles. Its cognitive niche requires it to be thinking about things not as they are, but what they could be. I need to build a nest. Okay. That's an instinctive behavior. But I need to go somewhere else because it's getting too cold for me. So we're gonna. We're gonna try some other places. We're gonna. We're gonna build a ship and go across the ocean. Not because we have to, but because we haven't gone there yet. I think that this is why species like ours are here today. I think it's why the dinosaurs didn't survive the asteroid impact, but birds and mammals did.

[A]

Don't you also think this is a little bit why science is like the most human thing possible? Because it's like the extension of exactly what you're describing, Right? Like if our brains are constantly trying to make predictions and then think about what might happen next, and then going and testing our theories and like constantly wanting more and more and more and not being comfortable with just existing, I sort of feel like that is a description of exactly what science is too. Like constantly trying to work out what's just around the next corner, that next bit of discovery, that next prediction.

[B]

That's right. Yeah. And philosophy as well. Like just continuing to ask questions for no purpose. Have I told you one of my favorite jokes? I think about this joke the most often.

[A]

Go on.

[B]

Okay, so in the joke, the dean of a university is speaking to the engineering department and he's like, guys, you are just. You're costing us too much money. Why can't you be like the math department? All they need is paper and pencils and wastepaper baskets. Actually, no. Why can't you be like the philosophy department? All they need is paper and pencils. And so even if there's. Even if bad ideas are allowed, that's a hallmark feature of humanity that you don't. You don't have that activity when you're a tree.

[A]

No, you don't. No, you don't. You just end up in the wastepaper basket.

[B]

That's right. Yeah.

[A]

That's why we're here. You're in the waste paper basket. Okay, well, I think that that is a very lovely place to wrap up this episode. We hope that you enjoyed that. There is a lot more to come from us. Make sure that you are following the rest of science. Wherever you get your podcast, make sure that you like and subscribe on YouTube.