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Creativity only comes from boredom
Afternoons With Nothing To Do
Chetan Bhagat grew up in Delhi in a time with no internet and little television. Entertainment was books and the occasional movie in a theater, and VHS had just arrived. On hot afternoons when nobody could go out and play, he and his younger brother made up film stories and told them to each other. Amitabh Bachchan was big then, so the stories went like: he walks in and hits this guy, or what if he had done this in that movie.
What It Built
Those stories were imaginary, but they were the seeds of being able to create stories. No grand plan to become a writer existed. What existed was an imagination trained on empty afternoons, plus a school magazine that printed his name.
A twelve-year-old with an iPad today would probably not do the same. The foundation of a writing life formed in hours with nothing else to do.
Why does boredom spark creativity?
In a 2014 study, psychologists Sandi Mann and Rebekah Cadman at the University of Central Lancashire asked volunteers to copy numbers from a phone book before a creativity test. Those who had done the dull task came up with more uses for a pair of plastic cups than a group who went straight to the test. Boredom pushes the mind to wander in search of stimulation. Mann has since written a book on the subject titled The Upside of Downtime.
What does the mind do during idle time?
When attention is not fixed on a task, a set of brain regions called the default mode network becomes more active. Neurologist Marcus Raichle at Washington University in St. Louis identified it in the early 2000s. The network is linked to daydreaming, recalling the past, imagining the future, and thinking about other people's perspectives.
How did VHS change how people watched films?
Before home video, films were seen in theaters or on broadcast schedules. Sony's Betamax appeared in 1975 and JVC's VHS followed in 1976. Rental shops let families watch movies at home. By the mid 1980s, VHS had won the format war against Betamax.
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