Scientific American Mind Vol 14 #1 The Brain A Look Inside

Early natural philosophers speculated that our brains contained a homunculus, a kernel of self-awareness not unlike the soul that was the irreducible core of our self. This “little person” peered out through our eyes and listened through our ears and somehow made sense of the universe. Neuroscientists ejected the homunculus from our heads, however. The circuitry of our brains does not all converge on one point where the essence of ourselves can sit and ruminate.

Instead whatever makes us us emerges from countless overlapping neural processes, in the same way that a symphony emerges from the playing of an orchestra’s musical instruments. One can analyze the instruments and the techniques of the musicians or watch the conductor or even read the musical score, but the actual music cannot be found anywhere until the performance begins.

Scientific American Mind: Bored - Find Your Focus And You Could Change Your Life

I’ve never been good at waiting around for something to do. If work slackens slightly, I volunteer for new projects that I will find challenging— and the way I race down the hall from one task to the next is the subject of a lot of good-natured office humor. My shoulder bag is always stuffed with reading material, to ward off idle moments during the train ride home. Truth is, I just really, really hate being bored.

One way I recently have staved off dullness is by reading Anna Gosline’s fascinating account of the complex psychological underpinnings of what she calls “this most tedious of human emotions.” In her feature article “Bored?” she explains how multifaceted those ho-hum moments actually are, influenced by levels of attention and awareness, emotional factors, adeptness at identifying one’s own feelings, and the nature of the matters at hand. Boredom can drive some people to achieve — but those who easily experience ennui are more prone
to suffer chronic depression or drug addiction. Getting at the roots of boredom could help prevent and treat these ailments. The story begins on page 20. Surely the least boring decade in the past century was the psychedelic sixties, when so much of pop culture seemingly came under a hallucinogenic influence.