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People Prefer Electric Shocks to Being Alone With Their Thoughts - The Atlantic

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People Prefer Electric Shocks to Being Alone With Their Thoughts - The Atlantic

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A new study finds we're not very good at entertaining ourselves.

Tomás Fano/flickr

Considering the many challenges life has to offer, entertaining yourself with your own thoughts for a few minutes seems like one of the easier hurdles to overcome. You could recall your favorite childhood memory, plan your weekend, or try to solve a problem from work. But it turns out that people find this assignment incredibly hard. And, according to new research, they'll even resort to giving themselves electric shocks to keep themselves entertained.

"We, like everyone else, noticed how wedded people seem to be to modern technology, and seem to shy away from just using their own thoughts to occupy themselves," the lead researcher, Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia, told me. "That got us to wondering whether this said something fundamental about people's ability to do this."
"We have this huge brain stocked full of pleasant memories and the ability to generate fantasies-surely it can't be that hard to spend a few minutes enjoying yourself with your thoughts."
"So we started out just kind of by the seat of our pants trying stuff to see how easy it was for people to entertain themselves with their own thoughts," he went on. "With the expectation, to be honest, that it wouldn't be that hard. We kind of thought, well, we have this huge brain that's stocked full of pleasant memories and has the ability to generate fantasies, and surely it can't be that hard to spend a few minutes enjoying yourself with your thoughts. And we just kept doing study after study finding that-for many people, anyway-not so much."

Wilson reported some of his team's results at a recent meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and also published them in today's issue of .

They report on 11 experiments. In most, they asked participants to put away any distractions and entertain themselves with their own thoughts for 6 to 15 minutes. Over the first six studies, 58 percent of participants rated the difficulty at or above the midpoint on a scale ("somewhat"), and 42 percent rated their enjoyment below the midpoint. In the seventh study, participants completed the task at home, and 32 percent admitted to cheating by using their phones, listening to music, or doing anything but just sitting there. (In the lab studies, one participant's data was tossed because an experimenter had accidentally left a pen behind and the subject used it to write a to-do list. Another's was tossed because an instruction sheet had been left behind and he used it to practice origami.)

Participants rated the task of entertaining themselves with their own thoughts as far less enjoyable and more conducive to mind-wandering than other mellow activities such as reading magazines or doing crossword puzzles.

In the most, ahem, shocking study, subjects were wired up and given the chance to shock themselves during the thinking period if they desired. They'd all had a chance to try out the device to see how painful it was. And yet, even among those who said they would pay money not to feel the shock again, a quarter of the women and two thirds of the men gave themselves a zap when left with their own thoughts. (One outlier pressed the button 190 times in the 15 minutes.) Commenting on the sudden appeal of electricity coursing through one's body, Wilson said, "I'm still just puzzled by that."

Why is entertaining ourselves so hard? Maybe subjects just couldn't decide where to steer their thoughts? Nope. In several studies, some were offered topics to fantasize about (going on a beautiful hike, etc.), but that tweak had no effect on difficulty or enjoyment.

Maybe modern technology is rotting our brains? Nope. Enjoyment was unrelated to age or the use of smart phones or social media. Wilson says if anything, use of technology is more a symptom than a cause of our difficulty with entertaining ourselves, although there could be circular effects.
"It would be a little odd to see a chimpanzee posed like Rodin's thinker for extended periods of time."
Wilson favors the "scanner hypothesis": Mammals have evolved to monitor their environments for dangers and opportunities, and so focusing completely internally for several minutes is unnatural. "It would be a little odd to see a chimpanzee posed like Rodin's thinker for extended periods of time," he said.

To test the idea, Wilson and his collaborators gave some subjects just a bit of external distraction-a rubber band to fidget with. In other experiments, they told some subjects to monitor a computer screen that would occasional display relevant messages. Compared to enjoyment in the regular thinking task, these alternatives had muddled results-sometimes they led to more enjoyment, sometimes less, sometimes the same amount. Discussing the scanner hypothesis, Wilson noted that the researchers don't yet have strong evidence, but, he said, "I'm convinced it's correct." Anecdotally, reverie's not so hard when you're exercising or knitting or staring out the window.

In addition to chasing the scanner hypothesis, Wilson's team hopes to see if practice makes the task easier. They did find a small correlation between meditation experience and ability to entertain oneself, and they suggest that control over one's thoughts may be one appeal of meditation. "I suspect that a little practice with just thinking pleasant thoughts in one form or another could work too," Wilson offered, before laughing. "As I say that, it sounds sort of audacious to say, well, the Buddhists have had two thousand years of mediation training, but I can train people to do it easier. We certainly haven't succeeded in doing it yet. This is something I want to test."

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People Prefer Electric Shocks to Being Alone With Their Thoughts

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A new study finds we're not very good at entertaining ourselves. Considering the many challenges life has to offer, entertaining yourself with your own thoughts for a few minutes seems like one of the easier hurdles to overcome. You could recall your favorite childhood memory, plan your weekend, or try to solve a problem from work.

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Essays to Make You a Better Person – Flavorwire

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Essays to Make You a Better Person – Flavorwire

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It's hard to be a person in the world today - or, really, any day, but today's what we've got. Humans are striving creatures, and also empathetic ones, so most of us are always looking for an opportunity to improve ourselves, even in tiny, literary ways. We've already established that novels can make you a better person, but of course, novels also take you down a long winding road to get there. If you're looking for a more direct shot to the heart, try an essay. After the jump, you'll find 50 essays more or less guaranteed to make you a better person - or at least a better-read one - some recommended by notables of the literary and literary nonfiction world, some recommended by yours truly, incessant consumer of the written word. Don't see the essay that changed your life? Please do add it to the list.
"Documents," Charles D'Ambrosio
(Recommended by Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams)

"You could call Charles D'Ambrosio's essay "Documents" a piece of memoir, an act of urgent fraternal curiosity, a parade of ghosts - and it's all of these, but formally it's really a series of close-readings connected by deep grooves of loss. D'Ambrosio examines texts written by his father and his troubled brothers - including letters, a suicide note, and a fanciful poem - in order to meditate on the intimacies and ruptures that have structured his family. As is the nature of his brilliance, D'Ambrosio resists conclusions. He honors the complexity embedded in his grief-not always a source of solace, but ultimately a powerful kind of tribute."

"Documents" will appear this November in . For now, read it here.

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50 Essays Guaranteed to Make You a Better Person

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It's hard to be a person in the world today -- or, really, any day, but today's what we've got. Humans are striving creatures, and also empathetic ones, so most of us are always looking for an opportunity to improve ourselves, even in tiny, literary ways.

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These School Lunches From Around The World Should Embarrass The U.S.

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These School Lunches From Around The World Should Embarrass The U.S.

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We ran a post about 8 school lunches. Here's why we took it down.

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A media guru shows us how to use social media intelligently, humanely, and, above all, mindfully. Like it or not, knowing how to make use of online tools without being overloaded with too much information is an essential ingredient to personal success in the twenty-first century.

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Hybrid Pedagogy | All learning is necessarily hybrid.

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Hybrid Pedagogy | All learning is necessarily hybrid.

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10 Things the Best Digital Teachers Do | Vitae

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10 Things the Best Digital Teachers Do | Vitae

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ChronicleVitae for higher ed jobs, career tools and advice

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Only ChronicleVitae delivers higher ed jobs, a free dossier service, and career resources of Chronicle caliber. Recruiters find the most informed candidates in higher ed here.

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Can Students Have Too Much Tech? - NYTimes.com

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Can Students Have Too Much Tech? - NYTimes.com

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Op-Ed Contributor

PRESIDENT OBAMA's domestic agenda, which he announced in his State of the Union address this month, has a lot to like: health care, maternity leave, affordable college. But there was one thing he got wrong. As part of his promise to educate American children for an increasingly competitive world, he vowed to "protect a free and open Internet" and "extend its reach to every classroom and every community."

More technology in the classroom has long been a policy-making panacea. But mounting evidence shows that showering students, especially those from struggling families, with networked devices will not shrink the class divide in education. If anything, it will widen it.

In the early 2000s, the Duke University economists Jacob Vigdor and Helen Ladd tracked the academic progress of nearly one million disadvantaged middle-school students against the dates they were given networked computers. The researchers assessed the students' math and reading skills annually for five years, and recorded how they spent their time. The news was not good.

"Students who gain access to a home computer between the 5th and 8th grades tend to witness a persistent decline in reading and math scores," the economists wrote, adding that license to surf the Internet was also linked to lower grades in younger children.

In fact, the students' academic scores dropped and remained depressed for as long as the researchers kept tabs on them. What's worse, the weaker students (boys, African-Americans) were more adversely affected than the rest. When their computers arrived, their reading scores fell off a cliff.

We don't know why this is, but we can speculate. With no adults to supervise them, many kids used their networked devices not for schoolwork, but to play games, troll social media and download entertainment. (And why not? Given their druthers, most adults would do the same.)

The problem is the differential impact on children from poor families. Babies born to low-income parents spend at least 40 percent of their waking hours in front of a screen - more than twice the time spent by middle-class babies. They also get far less cuddling and bantering over family meals than do more privileged children. The give-and-take of these interactions is what predicts robust vocabularies and school success. Apps and videos don't.

If children who spend more time with electronic devices are also more likely to be out of sync with their peers' behavior and learning by the fourth grade, why would adding more viewing and clicking to their school days be considered a good idea?

An unquestioned belief in the power of gadgetry has already led to educational snafus. Beginning in 2006, the nonprofit One Laptop Per Child project envisioned a digital utopia in which all students over 6 years old, worldwide, would own their own laptops. Impoverished children would thus have the power to go online and educate themselves - no school or teacher required. With laptops for poor children initially priced at $400, donations poured in.

But the program didn't live up to the ballyhoo. For one thing, the machines were buggy and often broke down. And when they did work, the impoverished students who received free laptops spent more time on games and chat rooms and less time on their homework than before, according to the education researchers Mark Warschauer and Morgan Ames. It's drive-by education - adults distribute the laptops and then walk away.

It's true that there is often an initial uptick in students' engagement with their studies - interactive apps can be fun. But the novelty wears off after a few months, said Larry Cuban, an emeritus education professor at Stanford.

Technology does have a role in education. But as Randy Yerrick, a professor of education at the University at Buffalo, told me, it is worth the investment only when it's perfectly suited to the task, in science simulations, for example, or to teach students with learning disabilities.

And, of course, technology can work only when it is deployed as a tool by a terrific, highly trained teacher. As extensive research shows, just one year with a gifted teacher in middle school makes it far less likely that a student will get pregnant in high school, and much more likely that she will go to college, earn a decent salary, live in a good neighborhood and save for retirement. To the extent that such a teacher can benefit from classroom technology, he or she should get it. But only when such teachers are effectively trained to apply a specific application to teaching a particular topic to a particular set of students - only then does classroom technology really work.

Even then, we still have no proof that the newly acquired, tech-centric skills that students learn in the classroom transfer to novel problems that they need to solve in other areas. While we're waiting to find out, the public money spent on wiring up classrooms should be matched by training and mentorship programs for teachers, so that a free and open Internet, reached through constantly evolving, beautifully packaged and compelling electronic tools, helps - not hampers - the progress of children who need help the most.

Susan Pinker, a developmental psychologist and columnist, is the author, most recently, of "The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make us Healthier, Happier, and Smarter."

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Opinion | Can Students Have Too Much Tech?

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Op-Ed Contributor PRESIDENT OBAMA's domestic agenda, which he announced in his State of the Union address this month, has a lot to like: health care, maternity leave, affordable college. But there was one thing he got wrong.

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www.du.edu/issues/media/documents/higheredreport.pdf

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Sullivan and Tinberg, What is "College-Level" Writing?

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Sullivan and Tinberg, What is "College-Level" Writing?

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What is "College-Level" Writing? - The WAC Clearinghouse

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Our books, journals, and resources are made available through the dedicated volunteer efforts of the large group of scholars involved with the Clearinghouse. Nonetheless, we still incur costs, such as honoraria to copy editors and designers, software and server costs, and fees associated with obtaining ISBN numbers.