As a pair of psychologists first put it in the 1980s, David Epstein explains (in Inside the Box), humans are “cognitive misers”:
With our limited cognitive resources, it is efficient to reach for solutions that are easy and intuitive. Given complete freedom, we tend to default to simple solutions, not because they are good, but because they are familiar.
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Because we are cognitive misers, breakthrough creativity happens when the easy and intuitive path is blocked—by choice or by force.
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As the cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham has written: “Contrary to popular belief, the brain is not designed for thinking. It’s designed to save you from having to think.” Because the brain is naturally inclined to avoid effortful thinking and to rely instead on familiar patterns, complete freedom tends to lead to unoriginal ideas, simply repeating what is known. Constraints push the brain beyond its default tendencies, forcing it to engage in deeper problem-solving. Total freedom, then, is the enemy of creativity, and constraint its companion.
Daniel Willingham is the author of Why Don’t Students Like School? and Outsmart Your Brain and the “Ask the Cognitive Scientist” column in American Educator magazine.
“Total freedom, then, is the enemy of creativity, and constraint its companion.”
This is why boredom is so valuable. Boredom is usually a consequence of an oppressive combination of physical constraint, social constraint, temporal constraint, and cognitive constraint, like sitting in a 2-3 hour faculty meeting, a boring high school class, or a superfluous but mandatory training workshop. The mind, thus confined, suddenly begins to produce truly astonishing imaginations and scenarios in a desperate bid to entertain itself.
If necessity is the mother of invention, then boredom is the mother of imagination.