An empty room and a button
In 2014 Timothy Wilson and his colleagues at the University of Virginia asked a simple question: do people enjoy spending a few minutes doing nothing but thinking? Participants left their belongings, phones and pens outside and sat in a plain room for 6 to 15 minutes. The only rules were to stay seated and stay awake; the goal was to entertain themselves with their thoughts.
Across 11 studies published in Science, the results were largely the same. Most participants said it was hard to concentrate and that their minds wandered; about half rated their enjoyment at or below the midpoint of the scale. Those who did the same at home on their own did not enjoy it much either, and in that study 32% admitted breaking the rules to do something else.
Shock or silence?
The most talked-about part of the paper was Study 10. Participants first sampled a few stimuli, including a mild electric shock. They rated each one and said how much money they would give to experience it again or to avoid it. Then the 15-minute thinking period began. This time there was a button in the room: anyone who wanted to could shock themselves again.
Among those who had said they would pay not to be shocked again, 67% of men (12 of 18) and 25% of women (6 of 24) gave themselves at least one shock. One man shocked himself 190 times; an extreme case, but the percentages only count who pressed at least once. The researchers’ interpretation was striking: being alone was so hard that many people chose to do to themselves something they had just said they would pay to avoid.
Why can just thinking be hard?
In daily life our minds usually hold on to some task: reading, walking somewhere, talking to someone. In an empty room there is nothing to hold on to, and we alone steer our thoughts. Wilson and colleagues suggested that in this situation the mind easily slides towards one’s shortcomings and goes round in circles, while keeping thoughts on a pleasant path takes skill and effort.
Experiments on boredom paint an interesting picture too. Havermans and colleagues (2015) found that participants who watched a single short film clip over and over for an hour gave themselves more shocks than those who watched a neutral documentary. Yusoufzai and colleagues (2024) showed that people given a boring writing task played an aversive sound more often, even when a pleasant birdsong option was available. Escaping monotony, it seems, can sometimes matter more than whether the stimulus is pleasant.
Critiques and replications
Not everyone was convinced by Wilson and colleagues’ interpretation. In a commentary, Fox, Thompson, Andrews-Hanna and Christoff (2014) argued that a second look at the same data gives much weaker support to the claim that thinking is generally aversive, and to the shock finding, than suggested; the enjoyment of spontaneous thought varied enormously between people and moments.
Then again, one part of the main finding held up well. In a replication with 2,557 people from 11 countries, Buttrick and colleagues (2019) found that people randomly assigned to do something enjoyed it more overall than those assigned to just think, while the enjoyment of thinking varied from country to country. Hatano and colleagues (2022) showed the other side of the coin: people underestimate in advance how enjoyable simply waiting will be, and may therefore avoid waiting more than they need to.
Our two minutes
This experiment is a mild, short version of the original. Instead of an electric shock we use a half-second raspy sound; it is generated in software and passed through a filter that limits sudden peaks. You first hear the sound once and say whether you would pay never to hear it again. Then, for two minutes, there is only a button on the screen.
Two minutes are much easier than fifteen, and a sound is much milder than a shock. So we can expect the rates here to come out lower than in the original. What we really want to know is whether even people who said they would pay never to hear the sound again go back to it, and how that relates to how enjoyable they found the two minutes.
The upside of boredom
Boredom has a bad reputation, but some researchers see it as a signal: an alarm telling us that our attention is looking for something to hold on to. It is easy to answer that alarm with a phone every time; spending a few minutes just thinking may take practice.
That may be why Hatano and colleagues’ finding is encouraging: simply waiting can be more enjoyable than most of us expect. If you never pressed the button in this experiment, or found the two minutes enjoyable, you may be one of them.