Boredom

Schopenhauer described boredom as “a tame longing without any particular object,” Dostoevsky as “ a bestial and indefinable affliction,” and poet Joseph Brodsky as “time’s invasion of your world system.”

Unsurprisingly, not many can describe boredom even though most have felt it, and it is one of the central preoccupations of the age.

The most current definition comes from John Eastwood in Toronto: Drawing from research across many areas of psychological science and neuroscience, Eastwood and colleagues define boredom as “an aversive state of wanting, but being unable, to engage in satisfying activity,” which arises from failures in one of the brain’s attention networks.

Interestingly, people who investigate boredom, find it thus: “Boredom is a blast! To a curious and creative scholar, nothing is ever too trivial.”(Maureen Corrigan re Patricia Meyer Spacks’ book of that name) And, “Peter Toohey “finds a perverse kind of glee in his subject.” (Daily Telegraph) Curiously the subject seems to ingivorate those who study it.

We hope that this roundtable will, in bringing together scholars from literature, psychiatry, neurology, cultural history, and the law who have thought deeply about the subject, continue the exploration of the meaning and characteristics of boredom, and in so doing give the audience a chance to enlarge their own ideas.