# Boredom led to the birth of civilisation? With neuroscientist Dr Lila Landowski

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Dr Lila Landowski
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dRzfOC4m4k
- **Дата:** 30.03.2026
- **Длительность:** 3:23
- **Просмотры:** 202
- **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/50438

## Описание

My hot take is that I think boredom led to the birth of civilisation, as we know it.

In the bronze age, when humans finally had time to be safe - and bored - we saw the birth of mathematics, the first recorded written language... philosophers, artisans...

When we're bored, we often shift into our brain's default mode network, which is a key circuit for our mind wandering, introspection and creativity

With so much stimulating content around these days, we don't let ourselves be bored... we can barely cope with the discomfort of sitting with idle hands for a moment.

I think this is a disaster for our creativity and cognitive development.

I spoke a bit about this in Women's Health magazine https://www.womenshealthmag.com/health/a69714031/how-to-practice-boredom/

## Транскрипт

### Segment 1 (00:00 - 03:00) []

My hot take is that I think that boredom led to the birth of civilization as we know it. So my name's Dr. Mel Landowski and I'm a neuroscientist. If boredom was just a waste of time, then how come all of our greatest ideas happen when we're not actually trying? Neuroscience has some of the answers. So when you're bored, you're not just switching off, you're switching inward. And that's when part of your brain called the default mode network becomes active. That's when you start thinking of ultimate perspectives. You start thinking into the future. You start having simulations of a conversation that you had. You might start tying together abstract ideas in creative ways. It's where creativity really blossoms, right? And that's why so many great ideas come to people after they stop focusing on a problem and they just actually relax and unwind. Like if you're having a shower. Or in the case of Greek scholar Archimedes, when you're having a bath and you have a eureka moment. So I think we probably have boredom to thank for some of the greatest advances in human history. So let's wind back the clock here to the Bronze Age. So when the Sumerians and the Mesopotamians figured out that if they mixed copper with tin and they had bronze, right? They suddenly had this really strong and malleable metal that they could make into tools. So they suddenly had tools that they could use for agriculture. They to construct buildings and build civilizations. They had weapons that they could use to hunt. Food was abundant. All of a sudden, there was safety. And for the first time people didn't have to worry about surviving anymore. They had this luxury of actually being bored. And with that perspective, it's actually not surprising where we saw this blossoming of our first recorded language, mathematics. All right, you know, artisans came around. Thinkers appeared. You know, these days we don't let ourselves be bored. We see boredom as a problem rather than a solution. You know, we have so much stimulating, interesting, engaging things around us, so many things to watch and to see and to do that we're always filling our time with scrolling our phone or driving to work and listening to a podcast. Or we just don't let ourselves sit in this discomfort of actually being bored. And I think the true cost of that is more than just our creativity. I think there's probably something much more sinister there as well. So you might have seen the video of Dr. Jared Horvath testifying in Congress. Gen-Z is the first generation of modern history to underperform us on basically every cognitive measure we have, from basic attention to memory to literacy to numeracy to executive functioning to even general IQ. Even though they go to more school than we did. So why? What happened? What happened around 2010 that decoupled schooling from cognitive development? It can't be school. Schools basically look the same. It can't be biology. This has had a lot of time to change. I think we're at the beginning of a new epoch in human history and it's not a good one. I think we're going backwards. So over the last 200 years, every generation had been getting successively better until now. I just think we need to stop chasing stimulation. What do you think?