An American company called New Tech City has launched a project called Bored & Brilliant based on the premise that being so connected to technology may actually be killing our creativity.
Work by Sandi Mann of the University of Central Lancashire suggests that time for aimless thought could be important for creativity. In a study called “Does Being Bored Make Us More Creative?” she gave research subjects tasks of varying degrees of boringness and then used a standard measure of divergent thinking involving plastic cups. Those given the most boring task—reading the phone book—came up with more interesting uses for the cups.
“You come up with really great stuff when you don’t have that easy, lazy, junk food diet of the phone to scroll all the time,” Mann explains.
Visit Bored & Brilliant to sign up and listen to this 16-minute segment to hear experts make the case for boredom: