At some point today you will disengage from the rest of the world and just think. It could happen any number of ways: if your mind wanders from work, while you’re sitting in traffic, or if you just take a quiet moment to reflect. But as frequently as we drift into our own thoughts, a new study suggests that many of us don’t like it. In fact, some people even prefer an electric shock to being left alone with their minds.
“I’m really excited to see this paper,” says Matthew Killingsworth, a psychologist at the University of California (UC), San Francisco, who says his own work has turned up a similar result. “When people are spending time inside their heads, they’re markedly less happy.”
The researchers then decided to take the experiment a step further. For 15 minutes, the team left participants alone in a lab room in which they could push a button and shock themselves if they wanted to. The results were startling: Even though all participants had previously stated that they would pay money to avoid being shocked with electricity, 67% of men and 25% of women chose to inflict it on themselves rather than just sit there quietly and think, the team reports online today in Science.
I wonder how age factors in. Being alone with your thoughts is something that probably becomes more comfortable the more you practice it. In the modern age, though, nobody actually has to practice it when they can just pull out their phone. Anyone who grew up in pre-smartphone times has encountered countless times where they had no choice, though, usually you’re waiting for something or another, so you just sit there and wait. And think. Gets you rather used to it.
+1
I never felt like electrocuting myself out of boredom. Like, wtf? Shouldn’t that be considered a symptom of some mental disorder?
I also have zero issue being with left alone my thoughts, and never had even younger. Quite the contrary it is something I’m looking forward to.
But I’m also well into my 50s and even though I’ve been using a computer of some sort since the early 80s it was just a tool, next to many others, in my personal toolbox next to many other tools.
The most used tool in my toolbox is the humble notebook + pen, not the computer and certainly not the smartphone as I’m one of those abnormalities that doesn’t need to check my phone’s notifications every odd second. Heck, I don’t even Notifications turned on, and have not installed any social apps either… I even uninstalled the email app.
I wonder if this allergy to being left alone by themselves could (partially at least) explain the fact younger people don’t read anymore, or read a lot less than we used to at their age, and younger?
Boredom? no.
Curiosity? Fuck yes.
Should be a simple enough thing to determine, in multiple different ways. How many people only shocked themselves once, vs how many did it more than once, would be one. Would need to look at the details of the experiment and what data was gathered, which sadly seems to be behind a paywall.