The Art of Boredom: Don’t Just Do Something…Sit There!

In his compelling blog post titled “The 21st Century Skills Students Really LackDaniel Willingham, cognitive scientist who focuses on the brain basis of learning and memory, writes:

If we are concerned that students today are too quick to allow their attention to be yanked to the brightest object (or to willfully redirect it once their very low threshold of boredom is surpassed), we need to consider ways that we can bring home to them the potential reward of sustained attention.

Willingham argues that attention disorders may not be on the rise, rather…the need for and valuation of sustained attention in our culture may be on a dramatic decline. As digital natives (a term coined by Marc Prensky) – students can largely avoid the experience of even mild boredom in their daily lives…but also miss out on some of the rewards of patience, perseverance, and waiting it out.

How do we, instead of trying to wrest attention from the disengaged, inspire it through a little healthy boredom that has powerful rewards?

1 thought on “The Art of Boredom: Don’t Just Do Something…Sit There!

  1. Definitely – in the age of twitter I have experienced my attention span declining, and find it more difficult to engage in longer, more detailed reads.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s