WEBVTT

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My son and the iPhone
were born three weeks apart

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in June 2007.

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So while those early adopters
were lined up outside,

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waiting to get their hands
on this amazing new gadget,

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I was stuck at home
with my hands full of something else

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that was sending out
constant notifications --

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(Laughter)

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a miserable, colicky baby

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who would only sleep in a moving stroller
with complete silence.

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I literally was walking
10 to 15 miles a day,

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and the baby weight came off.

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That part was great.

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But man, was I bored.

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Before motherhood, I had been a journalist

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who rushed off when the Concorde crashed.

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I was one of the first
people into Belgrade

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when there was a revolution in Serbia.

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Now, I was exhausted.

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This walking went on for weeks.

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It was only until about three months in
that something shifted, though.

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As I pounded the pavement,

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my mind started to wander, too.

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I began imagining what I would do
when I finally did sleep again.

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So the colic did fade,

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and I finally got an iPhone

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and I put all those hours
of wandering into action.

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I created my dream job
hosting a public radio show.

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So there was no more
rushing off to war zones,

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but thanks to my new smartphone,

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I could be a mother and a journalist.

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I could be on the playground
and on Twitter at the same time.

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Yeah, well, when I thought that,

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when the technology came in and took over,

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that is when I hit a wall.

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So, I want you to picture this:

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you host a podcast, and you have to prove

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that the investment
of precious public radio dollars in you

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is worth it.

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My goal was to increase
my audience size tenfold.

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So one day, I sat down to brainstorm,

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as you do,

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and I came up barren.

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This was different
than writer's block, right?

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It wasn't like there was something there
waiting to be unearthed.

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There was just nothing.

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And so I started to think back:

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When was the last time
I actually had a good idea?

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Yeah, it was when I was pushing
that damn stroller.

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Now all the cracks in my day
were filled with phone time.

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I checked the headlines
while I waited for my latte.

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I updated my calendar
while I was sitting on the couch.

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Texting turned every spare moment

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into a chance to show to my coworkers
and my dear husband

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what a responsive person I was,

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or at least it was a chance to find
another perfect couch

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for my page on Pinterest.

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I realized that I was never bored.

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And anyway, don't only
boring people get bored?

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But then I started to wonder:

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What actually happens to us
when we get bored?

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Or, more importantly: What happens to us
if we never get bored?

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And what could happen if we got rid of
this human emotion entirely?

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I started talking to neuroscientists
and cognitive psychologists,

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and what they told me was fascinating.

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It turns out that when you get bored,

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you ignite a network in your brain
called the "default mode."

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So our body, it goes on autopilot
while we're folding the laundry

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or we're walking to work,

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but actually that is when our brain
gets really busy.

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Here's boredom researcher Dr. Sandi Mann.

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(Audio) Dr. Sandi Mann:
Once you start daydreaming

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and allow your mind to really wander,

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you start thinking a little bit
beyond the conscious,

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a little bit into the subconscious,

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which allows sort of different
connections to take place.

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It's really awesome, actually.

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Manoush Zomorodi: Totally awesome, right?

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So this is my brain in an fMRI,

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and I learned that in the default mode
is when we connect disparate ideas,

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we solve some of our most
nagging problems,

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and we do something called
"autobiographical planning."

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This is when we look back at our lives,

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we take note of the big moments,
we create a personal narrative,

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and then we set goals

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and we figure out what steps
we need to take to reach them.

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But now we chill out on the couch
also while updating a Google Doc

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or replying to email.

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We call it "getting shit done,"

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but here's what neuroscientist
Dr. Daniel Levitin says

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we're actually doing.

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(Audio) Dr. Daniel Levitin:
Every time you shift your attention

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from one thing to another,

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the brain has to engage
a neurochemical switch

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that uses up nutrients in the brain
to accomplish that.

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So if you're attempting to multitask,

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you know, doing four
or five things at once,

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you're not actually doing
four or five things at once,

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because the brain doesn't work that way.

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Instead, you're rapidly shifting
from one thing to the next,

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depleting neural resources as you go.

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(Audio) MZ: So switch, switch, switch,
you're using glucose, glucose, glucose.

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(Audio) DL: Exactly right, and we have
a limited supply of that stuff.

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MZ: A decade ago, we shifted
our attention at work

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every three minutes.

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Now we do it every 45 seconds,

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and we do it all day long.

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The average person checks email
74 times a day,

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and switches tasks on their computer

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566 times a day.

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I discovered all this
talking to professor of informatics,

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Dr. Gloria Mark.

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(Audio) Dr. Gloria Mark: So we find
that when people are stressed,

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they tend to shift
their attention more rapidly.

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We also found, strangely enough,

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that the shorter the amount of sleep
that a person gets,

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the more likely they are
to check Facebook.

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So we're in this vicious, habitual cycle.

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MZ: But could this cycle be broken?

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What would happen
if we broke this vicious cycle?

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Maybe my listeners could help me find out.

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What if we reclaimed
those cracks in our day?

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Could it help us
jump-start our creativity?

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We called the project
"Bored and Brilliant."

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And I expected, you know,
a couple hundred people to play along,

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but thousands of people
started signing up.

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And they told me the reason
they were doing it

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was because they were worried
that their relationship with their phone

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had grown kind of ...
"codependent," shall we say.

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(Audio) Man: The relationship
between a baby and its teddy bear

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or a baby and its binky

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or a baby that wants its mother's cradle

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when it's done with being held
by a stranger --

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(Laughs)

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that's the relationship
between me and my phone.

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(Audio) Woman: I think of my phone
like a power tool:

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extremely useful, but dangerous
if I'm not handling it properly.

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(Audio) Woman 2:
If I don't pay close attention,

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I'll suddenly realize
that I've lost an hour of time

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doing something totally mindless.

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MZ: OK, but to really measure
any improvement,

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we needed data, right?

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Because that's what we do these days.

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So we partnered with some apps
that would measure how much time

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we were spending every day on our phone.

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If you're thinking it's ironic

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that I asked people
to download another app

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so that they would spend
less time on their phones:

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yeah, but you gotta meet people
where they are.

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(Laughter)

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So before challenge week,

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we were averaging two hours
a day on our phones

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and 60 pickups,

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you know, like, a quick check,
did I get a new email?

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Here's what Tina, a student
at Bard College,

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discovered about herself.

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(Audio) Tina: So far, I've been spending

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between 150 and 200 minutes
on my phone per day,

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and I've been picking up my phone
70 to 100 times per day.

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And it's really concerning,

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because that's so much time
that I could have spent

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doing something more productive,
more creative, more towards myself,

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because when I'm on my phone,
I'm not doing anything important.

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MZ: Like Tina, people were starting
to observe their own behavior.

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They were getting ready
for challenge week.

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And that Monday,

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they started to wake up
to instructions in their inbox,

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an experiment to try.

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Day one:

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"Put it in your pocket."

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Take that phone out of your hand.

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See if you can eliminate the reflex
to check it all day long,

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just for a day.

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And if this sounds easy,

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you haven't tried it.

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Here's listener Amanda Itzko.

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(Audio) Amanda Itzko:
I am absolutely itching.

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I feel a little bit crazy,

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because I have noticed
that I pick up my phone

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when I'm just walking
from one room to another,

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getting on the elevator,

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and even -- and this is the part
that I am really embarrassed

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to actually say out loud --

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in the car.

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MZ: Yikes.

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Yeah, well, but as Amanda learned,

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this itching feeling
is not actually her fault.

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That is exactly the behavior
that the technology is built to trigger.

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(Laughter)

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I mean, right?

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Here's former Google designer,
Tristan Harris.

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(Audio) Tristan Harris: If I'm Facebook
or I'm Netflix or I'm Snapchat,

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I have literally a thousand engineers

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whose job is to get
more attention from you.

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I'm very good at this,

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and I don't want you to ever stop.

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And you know, the CEO
of Netflix recently said,

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"Our biggest competitors
are Facebook, YouTube and sleep."

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I mean, so there's a million places
to spend your attention,

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but there's a war going on to get it.

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MZ: I mean, you know the feeling:

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that amazing episode
of "Transparent" ends,

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and then the next one starts playing

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so you're like, eh, OK fine,
I'll just stay up and watch it.

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Or the LinkedIn progress bar
says you are this close

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to having the perfect profile,

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so you add a little more
personal information.

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As one UX designer told me,

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the only people who refer
to their customers as "users"

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are drug dealers and technologists.

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(Laughter)

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(Applause)

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And users, as we know,
are worth a lot of money.

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Here's former Facebook
product manager and author,

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Antonio García Martínez.

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(Audio) Antonio García Martínez:
The saying is, if any product is free

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then you're the product;
your attention is the product.

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But what is your attention worth?

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That's why literally every time
you load a page,

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not just on Facebook or any app,

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there's an auction being held instantly,
billions of times a day,

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for exactly how much
that one ad impression cost.

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MZ: By the way, the average person
will spend two years of their life

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on Facebook.

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So, back to challenge week.

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Immediately, we saw
some creativity kick in.

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Here's New Yorker Lisa Alpert.

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(Audio) Lisa Alpert: I was bored, I guess.

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So I suddenly looked at the stairway
that went up to the top of the station,

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and I thought, you know,

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I had just come down that stairway,
but I could go back up

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and then come back down
and get a little cardio.

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So I did,

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and then I had a little more time,
so I did it again and I did it again,

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and I did it 10 times.

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And I had a complete cardio workout.

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I got on that R train feeling
kind of exhausted,

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but, like, wow,
that had never occurred to me.

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How is that possible?

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(Laughter)

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MZ: So creativity, I learned, means
different things to different people.

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(Laughter)

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But everyone found
day three's challenge the hardest.

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It was called "Delete that app."

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Take that app -- you know the one;

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that one that always gets you,
it sucks you in --

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take it off your phone,

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even if just for the day.

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I deleted the game Two Dots
and nearly cried.

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(Laughter)

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Yeah, Two Dots players
know what I'm talking about.

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But my misery had good company.

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(Audio) Man 2: This is Liam
in Los Angeles,

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and I deleted Twitter, Facebook,
Instagram, Tumblr, Snapchat and Vine

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from my phone

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in one fell swoop.

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And it was kind of an embarrassingly
emotional experience at first.

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It felt weirdly lonely
to look at that lock screen

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with no new notifications on it.

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But I really liked deciding for myself

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when to think about or access
my social networks,

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not giving my phone the power
to decide that for me.

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So thank you.

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(Audio) Woman 3: Deleting the Twitter app
was very sad,

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and I feel I maybe, over the last year
when I've been on Twitter,

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have developed an addiction to it,

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and this "Bored and Brilliant" challenge
has really made me realize it.

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After a brief period of really horrible
withdrawal feeling,

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like lack-of-caffeine headache,

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I now feel lovely.

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I had a lovely dinner with my family,

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and I hope to continue this structured use
of these powerful tools.

00:12:33.377 --> 00:12:35.876
(Audio) Woman 4: I don't have
that guilty gut feeling

00:12:35.009 --> 00:12:37.304
I have when I know
I'm wasting time on my phone.

00:12:38.219 --> 00:12:41.721
Maybe I'll have to start giving myself
challenges and reminders like this

00:12:41.745 --> 00:12:42.897
every morning.

00:12:42.921 --> 00:12:44.614
MZ: I mean, yes, this was progress.

00:12:44.638 --> 00:12:47.105
I could not wait to see
what the numbers said

00:12:47.129 --> 00:12:48.793
at the end of that week.

00:12:49.971 --> 00:12:51.874
But when the data came in,

00:12:51.898 --> 00:12:54.171
it turned out that we had cut down,

00:12:54.195 --> 00:12:55.433
on average,

00:12:55.457 --> 00:12:57.723
just six minutes --

00:12:57.747 --> 00:12:59.828
from 120 minutes a day on our phones

00:13:00.581 --> 00:13:02.418
to 114.

00:13:03.474 --> 00:13:05.093
Yeah. Whoop-de-do.

00:13:05.117 --> 00:13:08.188
So I went back to the scientists
feeling kind of low,

00:13:08.851 --> 00:13:09.899
and they just laughed at me,

00:13:10.355 --> 00:13:12.786
and they said, you know,
changing people's behavior

00:13:12.081 --> 00:13:13.614
in such a short time period

00:13:14.367 --> 00:13:16.594
was ridiculously ambitious,

00:13:16.618 --> 00:13:21.837
and actually what you've achieved
is far beyond what we thought possible.

00:13:21.861 --> 00:13:25.697
Because more important than the numbers,
were the people's stories.

00:13:25.721 --> 00:13:27.363
They felt empowered.

00:13:27.387 --> 00:13:30.026
Their phones had been transformed

00:13:30.005 --> 00:13:31.734
from taskmasters

00:13:31.803 --> 00:13:33.425
back into tools.

00:13:34.528 --> 00:13:37.623
And actually, I found what
the young people said most intriguing.

00:13:38.502 --> 00:13:39.657
Some of them told me

00:13:39.681 --> 00:13:41.943
that they didn't recognize
some of the emotions

00:13:41.967 --> 00:13:43.762
that they felt during challenge week,

00:13:43.786 --> 00:13:45.273
because, if you think about it,

00:13:45.297 --> 00:13:48.261
if you have never known life
without connectivity,

00:13:48.285 --> 00:13:50.714
you may never have experienced boredom.

00:13:51.291 --> 00:13:53.357
And there could be consequences.

00:13:53.381 --> 00:13:56.810
Researchers at USC have found --
they're studying teenagers

00:13:56.834 --> 00:13:58.930
who are on social media
while they're talking to their friends

00:13:59.818 --> 00:14:01.104
or they're doing homework,

00:14:01.128 --> 00:14:04.943
and two years down the road,
they are less creative and imaginative

00:14:04.967 --> 00:14:06.821
about their own personal futures

00:14:06.845 --> 00:14:11.058
and about solving societal problems,
like violence in their neighborhoods.

00:14:11.511 --> 00:14:14.116
And we really need this next generation

00:14:14.014 --> 00:14:16.240
to be able to focus on some big problems:

00:14:16.039 --> 00:14:18.483
climate change, economic disparity,

00:14:18.858 --> 00:14:20.895
massive cultural differences.

00:14:21.482 --> 00:14:24.203
No wonder CEOs in an IBM survey

00:14:24.227 --> 00:14:28.840
identified creativity as the number one
leadership competency.

00:14:30.034 --> 00:14:31.702
OK, here's the good news, though:

00:14:31.726 --> 00:14:35.497
In the end, 20,000 people
did "Bored and Brilliant" that week.

00:14:35.521 --> 00:14:37.953
Ninety percent cut down on their minutes.

00:14:37.977 --> 00:14:40.064
Seventy percent got more time to think.

00:14:40.871 --> 00:14:43.000
People told me that they slept better.

00:14:43.024 --> 00:14:44.341
They felt happier.

00:14:44.365 --> 00:14:47.989
My favorite note was from a guy
who said he felt like he was waking up

00:14:48.013 --> 00:14:50.192
from a mental hibernation.

00:14:51.961 --> 00:14:54.405
Some personal data and some neuroscience

00:14:54.429 --> 00:14:57.570
gave us permission
to be offline a little bit more,

00:14:57.594 --> 00:15:00.537
and a little bit of boredom
gave us some clarity

00:15:00.561 --> 00:15:02.880
and helped some of us set some goals.

00:15:03.976 --> 00:15:06.087
I mean, maybe constant connectivity

00:15:06.111 --> 00:15:08.757
won't be cool in a couple of years.

00:15:09.893 --> 00:15:13.451
But meanwhile, teaching people,
especially kids,

00:15:13.475 --> 00:15:16.602
how to use technology
to improve their lives

00:15:16.626 --> 00:15:18.041
and to self-regulate

00:15:18.065 --> 00:15:20.640
needs to be part of digital literacy.

00:15:22.505 --> 00:15:24.812
So the next time you go
to check your phone,

00:15:25.452 --> 00:15:29.524
remember that if you don't decide
how you're going to use the technology,

00:15:29.548 --> 00:15:31.866
the platforms will decide for you.

00:15:32.833 --> 00:15:34.414
And ask yourself:

00:15:34.438 --> 00:15:36.176
What am I really looking for?

00:15:36.002 --> 00:15:39.697
Because if it's to check email,
that's fine -- do it and be done.

00:15:39.919 --> 00:15:42.587
But if it's to distract yourself
from doing the hard work

00:15:42.611 --> 00:15:44.614
that comes with deeper thinking,

00:15:44.935 --> 00:15:46.343
take a break,

00:15:46.367 --> 00:15:47.765
stare out the window

00:15:48.487 --> 00:15:51.332
and know that by doing nothing

00:15:51.356 --> 00:15:56.058
you are actually being
your most productive and creative self.

00:15:56.082 --> 00:15:58.805
It might feel weird
and uncomfortable at first,

00:15:58.829 --> 00:16:01.715
but boredom truly can lead to brilliance.

00:16:02.214 --> 00:16:03.366
Thank you.

00:16:03.039 --> 00:16:07.826
(Applause)