If someone had told Sisyphus that he was no longer required to push a large boulder up a mountainside for all eternity . . . would he have carried on anyway? According to a 2010 paper in the journal Psychological Science, he might well have. “Our research suggests that Sisyphus was better off with his punishment […]
Tag: boredom
Boredom at the cinema – an exploration [study]
Have you ever been profoundly bored watching a film? If so, is it possible that you may have overlooked the positive aspects of profound boredom? Either way(s), there’s an article on the subject of cinematic boredom in the current issue of the journal Film Philosophy, in which Dr Chiara Quaranta of the University of Edinburgh, […]
Podcast Episode #205: “Color Preferences in the Insane”
Color Preference in the Insane, Can Consumers Recognize the Taste of their Favorite Beer?, Effect of Audience Boredom on the Power Hungry, You Never Sleep Alone, Improbable Medical Review, Extracting the Wrong Tooth, and Telephones for Animals. In episode #206, Marc Abrahams shows some unfamiliar research studies to Jean Berko Gleason, Chris Cotsapas, Maggie Lettvin, […]
Divine boredom (new papers)
Has God ever been bored, or is currently bored, or might, at some stage, become bored? In a 2017 paper for the scholarly journal Religious Studies (Volume 53, Issue 1, pp. 51-70) authors Vuko Andrić (Akademischer Rat., University of Bayreuth, Germany) and Attila Tanyi (University of Tromsø, Norway) suggest that if God is omnitemporal [i.e. […]
The attempt to automatically recognize boredom [podcast 67]
Can a machine reliably recognize when a human is bored? That is the central question in this week’s Improbable Research podcast. SUBSCRIBE on Play.it, iTunes, or Spotify to get a new episode every week, free. This week, Marc Abrahams — with dramatic readings by Nicole Sharp — tells about: How to automatically recognize boredom — “A Preliminary System for Recognizing Boredom,” Allison M. Jacobs, Benjamin Fransen, J. Malcolm McCurry, Frederick W.P. Heckel, […]
A Theoretically Interesting Opinion About Boredom
You may, depending on your boredom threshold, find this study to be of little interest: “The bright side of boredom,” Andreas Elpidorou, Frontiers in Psychology, November 3, 2014. (Thanks to investigator Neil Martin for bringing this to our attention.) The author, at the University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky, explains: “I wish to suggest that one […]
Philosophy? Tedious?
In his Presidential Address at the 53nd [sic] Annual Meeting of the Florida Philosophical Association, professor David McNaughton, of Florida State University, US, revealed that he had been inspired by a 2007 Guardian article by Jonathan Wolff (head of philosophy at University College London) which began: “Why is academic writing so boring?” Professor McNaughton refined […]
Breakthroughs in boredom
People who design apps — or, for that matter, design startup companies — want their creations to elicit excitement. They (usually) design to avoid creating boredom. A fairly recent Canadian study offers exciting insights into the nature of boredom. Designers take heed! The study is “The Unengaged Mind: Defining Boredom in Terms of Attention,” John D. Eastwood, Alexandra Frischen, Mark J. Fenske and Daniel […]
A possibly fascinating study of four possible causes of boredom propensity
Some academic studies are best appreciated by reading them aloud, in a stately voice, in a coffee shop. Perhaps this is one of those studies: “I can’t get no satisfaction: Potential causes of boredom,” Cory J. Gerritsen, Maggie E. Toplak [pictured here], Jessica Sciaraffa, John Eastwood, Consciousness and Cognition, vol. 27, July 2014, pp. 27–41. […]
Boos Act as Booze on the Power-Hungry
An experiment measured what happened when power-driven people gave speeches to an audience that responded with blatant, deliberate acts of boredom. The researchers, Eugene Fodor and David Wick of Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, wrote up the details in a blandly titled monograph, Need for Power and Affective Response to Negative Audience Reaction to […]