BORED WITH DRUGS, SEX AND ROCK (CLIMBING)? TRY 'FLOW'

We humans take our feelings very seriously. How else to explain the
theatrical dread most of us have of boredom? After all, who among us hasn't
threatened to die of it at some time or another?

Recently faced with a long trans-Atlantic flight, I naively assumed I could
trot out an assortment of diversions to beat the tedium of cramped
confinement, airplane food and wailing infants.

Shortly after takeoff, I pulled out a stack of magazines and books, feeling
impervious to the ennui that would soon overtake my fellow passengers. Dead
wrong.

Within three hours, I had succumbed to boredom. Well, if you can't beat it,
I told myself, at least you can write about it.

Boredom has long been the province of psychologists: some view it as a kind
of mental smoke screen that obscures and protects us against even more
negative emotions like anger and anxiety. Well, with defenses like that we
hardly need enemies.

Not be to outdone, the philosophers have weighed in, mainly from the
existential camp, claiming boredom is just the human response to the
meaninglessness of life.

More recently, neuroscientists have taken a crack at boredom by studying the
brain's arousal and reward systems.

Everyone, of course, knows what it's like to be bored. Normally, boredom
arises in response to monotonous and dull situations, and it evaporates the
moment the environment changes.

But some people have pathological boredom, which is a pervasive and painful
mental state that seems to have a life of its own. They are chronically
bored, and can get relief only from intense excitement.

As a psychiatrist, I frequently ask patients what they do for fun. This is,
of course, a sneaky way to find out, among other things, how prone to
boredom they are.

One patient, in response to this question, said that even when she was not
feeling depressed, she often felt bored and empty. Nothing, including
people, held her interest for more than a few hours, so she would flit from
one friend or activity to another. Her greatest satisfaction, fleeting as it
was, came from bungee jumping off bridges. To escape boredom and anxiety,
she would also abuse opiates and engage in unsafe sex.

Like others with borderline personality disorder, she had intense and
unstable relationships with people that veered from adoration to intense
hatred and jealousy the moment she felt the merest slight.

Everyone has an optimal level of arousal, from the couch potato who breaks a
sweat just thinking of something as normally unrisky as bicycling to the
daredevil who doesn't feel alive unless he's risking his life, say, climbing
icy sheer cliffs, on a routine basis.

What's intriguing is that there are fundamental biological differences
between people who seek sensation and novelty and those who avoid it.
Neuroscientists have known for years that high-sensation seekers show
augmented brain electrical responses on EEG's in response to increasing
visual or acoustic stimuli. Low sensation seekers, in contrast, show
diminished EEG responses as the stimulus intensity rises.

This suggests that high sensation seekers experience a lower base line level
of brain arousal, which may explain their constant need for stimulation and
intolerance of monotony.

A further clue into the neurobiology of boredom comes from the observation
that thrill seekers self-medicate with a variety of recreational drugs to
stave off boredom. Favored drugs, like cocaine, Ecstasy, opiates and
alcohol, all activate the brain's reward system, despite their diverse
pharmacology. And they all produce a sudden increase in the reward circuit's
main neurotransmitter, dopamine.

The curious thing is that there are drugs that can simulate all kinds of
emotional states like sadness, anxiety, fear and euphoria, but none that can
induce boredom.

The most effective drug for inducing a state of boredom is, surprisingly,
cocaine. Once cocaine has flooded the brain with dopamine and the euphoria
has evaporated, the neurons become rapidly desensitized to dopamine. In
short, the brain responds by decreasing dopamine activity, producing a state
of crashing boredom.

Not only do certain drugs stimulate this dopamine reward pathway, but so do
natural reinforcers like sex and food. This probably accounts for the fact
that sensation seekers are drawn to promiscuous sex and other exciting
activities like gambling and bungee-jumping.

In a recent study published in the journal Neuron, Dr. Hans Breiter at
Massachusetts General Hospital used functional M.R.I. to examine a group of
12 normal men while they played a computer game similar to roulette.

Subjects who only imagined winning a bet showed activation of the amygdala
and nucleus accumbens, core structures of the brain's reward pathway. And
this is the same brain activation pattern seen in studies of subjects who
use cocaine.

We shouldn't be too hard, though, on thrill seekers. In evolutionary terms,
they may be among humanity's greatest innovators, who advanced knowledge by
their taste for adventure. Where would pharmacology be, built largely as it
is on plant derivatives, without our intrepid hominid ancestors who risked
their lives trying out the medicinal effects of plants and herbs on
themselves?

Still, the antidote to boredom for most of us is not thrill, according to
Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the University of Chicago psychologist; it's a
phenomenon he called flow. Flow happens when a person's skill and talent
perfectly match the challenge of an activity: playing in the zone, where
there is total and un-self-conscious absorption in the activity. Make the
task too challenging and anxiety results; make it too easy and boredom
emerges.

Flow also gets to the heart of fun. It's not hard to see why the enforced
tranquillity of a Caribbean vacation could be a dreadful bore for a
workaholic but bliss for a couch potato; temperament, as well as talent,
have to match the activity or there is trouble in paradise.

So boredom has really gotten a bum rap: it's just the dark neurobiologic
twin of pleasure. And since they share the same brain circuits, life without
boredom would be, well, no fun at all.