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Reference topic 30: The Attention Economy and the Boredom Deficit

Phones, boredom and attention: what screens do to the brain

ProbableEvidence grade: Probable. Good observational evidence with a plausible mechanism, or small or few trials.14 sources4 graded recommendationsTopic hub: Phones and attention

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In 2014 a group of psychologists at the University of Virginia and Harvard published 11 studies in Science whose method was almost nothing at all. Put a volunteer alone in a room, take away anything there is to do, and ask them to sit and think for somewhere between 6 and 15 minutes. That was the experiment. Most said afterwards that they had not enjoyed it.1

One of the studies added a single object to the room. Before the thinking period began, participants were given a small electric shock, mild but genuinely unpleasant, and asked what they would pay never to feel it again. On average they named a price: they would rather lose money than be shocked a second time. Then they were left alone with their thoughts and with a button that delivered that same shock.

Mismatch card

The system

The reward circuit that learns from unpredictable payouts, and the default mode network that runs during unstructured time.

What it expects

Rewards that are earned, spaced and occasionally absent, separated by long intervals with nothing to attend to.

What it gets

A pocket device engineered for time on device, paying out on a variable schedule and filling every gap in the day.

What happens in the gap

Checking behavior that resists extinction, and the loss of the idle minutes in which the brain's inward work has always been done.

The handrail

Phone-free times and places, notifications off, deliberate gaps, a longer break if needed (●●○)

Strength of evidence

●●○ One large randomized deactivation trial and solid imaging work on the default network, set against a genuinely unresolved argument about adolescents and weak commercial data on how often people check.

What this topic covers

  • ·The Network That Runs When Nothing Else Does
  • ·Designed to Be Checked
  • ·Counting the Checks
  • ·The Four-Week Experiment

The practical version is in the book: Chapter 12, Attention in the Age of the Phone.

The handrail

Topic 42 holds the full program for attention and people. What follows is the minimum.

Each recommendation carries the strength of the evidence behind it. How the grades work.

  1. Phone-free times and places

    ProbableEvidence grade: Probable. Good observational evidence with a plausible mechanism, or small or few trials.

    Meals, the first and last hour of the day, and the bedroom overnight. The support is indirect but it is randomized: four weeks off Facebook raised offline time with friends and family and nudged well-being up.9 Keep a phone reachable for genuine emergencies; this is a rule about defaults, not a vow.

  2. Turn off non-essential notifications

    EmergingEvidence grade: Emerging. Early, small, animal-only, or actively contested.

    Every push alert is one more unpredictable payout on the schedule Schüll described in casinos.4 Switching them off is a plausible extension of that mechanism, not a tested intervention; no controlled trial isolating notifications was found for this chapter. The cost of trying is close to zero.

  3. Leave gaps in the day

    EmergingEvidence grade: Emerging. Early, small, animal-only, or actively contested.

    A walk, a commute or a wait, taken without the device. The evidence supports this much: the default network runs during unstructured time and handles memory, self-reflection and imagining the future.23 It does not yet support a claim that scheduling such gaps improves any measured outcome. Worth trying, openly unproven.

  4. A structured break, if checking has become compulsive

    EmergingEvidence grade: Emerging. Early, small, animal-only, or actively contested.

    The addiction physician Anna Lembke recommends 30 days of abstinence from a compulsively used substance or behavior to let the reward baseline settle; the first edition of this book wrongly gave 24 to 72 hours.14 This is a clinical recommendation from her book, not a trial result. A "dopamine fast" is not a treatment for a diagnosed condition; if symptoms are severe, see a clinician and stay on prescribed care.

The skeptic's corner

The case against this topic, from the research itself.

The biggest open question is whether phones and social media lie behind the rise in teenage mental illness, and the evidence does not yet settle it. In The Anxious Generation (2024) Jonathan Haidt argues that between roughly 2010 and 2015 a play-based childhood gave way to a phone-based one. He calls that shift a major cause of a sharp rise in teenage depression, anxiety and self-harm, hitting girls hardest. His remedies: delay access to smartphones and social media, make schools phone-free, and allow more unsupervised free play.10 The rise itself is well documented in national surveys. The causal claim is the contested part.

The developmental psychologist Candice Odgers, reviewing the book in Nature, put the other case bluntly: "Hundreds of researchers, myself included, have searched for the kind of large effects suggested by Haidt. Our efforts have produced a mix of no, small, and mixed associations. Most data are correlative." Where links over time do turn up, she wrote, they suggest that young people who already have mental-health problems use such platforms more often, not that social media use predicts or causes depression.11 Jean Twenge's large-survey work on American adolescents reports a dose-response association: the heavier the screen use, the lower the well-being. But it too is cross-sectional, a snapshot of one moment, so it cannot separate cause from selection.12

Set the two best cases side by side. Haidt's strongest card is timing and pattern: the mental-health measures turn inside a narrow window, the years smartphones and social accounts became standard teenage equipment, and the worsening is concentrated in girls. Odgers's strongest card is that hundreds of researchers have run the direct search and keep finding associations too small and inconsistent to carry a claim that size. Reverse causation, distress driving use, reads the long-term data equally well. Neither card is a trump. What would move the argument: randomized reductions in adolescents on the model of the Facebook experiment, long follow-ups, and designs that watch the same child over years.

Two smaller cautions. The shock study drew published pushback the same year it appeared, and a later paper examined why some people give themselves mild shocks during free thinking.13 The phone-checking numbers, as noted, are marketing-adjacent research. Nothing here argues against treatment for depression, anxiety or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Terms this topic defines

Related topics

Sources cited above

  1. 1.Wilson, T.D., Reinhard, D.A., Westgate, E.C., Gilbert, D.T., et al. (2014). "Just think: the challenges of the disengaged mind." Science, 345(6192), 75-77. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1250830 (11 studies with student and community-adult samples; thinking periods of 6 to 15 minutes. The 67% and 25% self-shocking figures are corroborated consistently across Science's own news coverage and independent science-journalism accounts, but were not read in the paper's own tables for this book's research pass.)
  2. 10.Haidt, J. (2024). The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Penguin Press.
  3. 11.Odgers, C.L. (2024). "The great rewiring: is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?" Nature, 628(8006), 29-30, published online 29 March 2024. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00902-2 (Quotation corroborated across multiple independent summaries of the review, including Haidt's own published response quoting the same passage; the Nature page itself was behind a login wall during this book's research pass.)
  4. 12.Twenge, J.M., Martin, G.N., and Campbell, W.K. (2018). "Decreases in psychological well-being among American adolescents after 2012 and links to screen time during the rise of smartphone technology." Emotion, 18(6), 765-780. (Large cross-sectional survey analysis; citation and design confirmed, effect sizes not independently checked, so no specific figure from it is quoted here.)
  5. 13.Commentary: "Is thinking really aversive? A commentary on Wilson et al." Frontiers in Psychology (2014). Follow-up: "Motivations underlying self-infliction of pain during thinking for pleasure." Scientific Reports (2022). (The existence of both was confirmed in this book's research pass; neither full text was read, so only the fact of scholarly pushback is claimed here, with no figures taken from either.)
  6. 9.Allcott, H., Braghieri, L., Eichmeyer, S., and Gentzkow, M. (2020). "The welfare effects of social media." American Economic Review, 110(3), 629-676. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20190658 (Randomized deactivation experiment around the 2018 US midterm elections. Study design and the direction of every effect reported here were confirmed against the published article and its working-paper abstract; the approximate participant count of 2,897 and the 0.09 standard-deviation well-being effect are corroborated across independent citing sources rather than read from the article's own tables.) (well-being effect on the order of 0.09 standard deviations)
  7. 4.Schüll, N.D. (2012). Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. Princeton University Press. (Ethnographic monograph based on roughly 15 years of fieldwork; qualitative, not a controlled study. Cited here for the design analogy, not for neurochemistry.)
  8. 2.Raichle, M.E., MacLeod, A.M., Snyder, A.Z., Powers, W.J., Gusnard, D.A., and Shulman, G.L. (2001). "A default mode of brain function." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98(2), 676-682. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.98.2.676 (meta-analysis of nine PET studies) (regions more active at rest: medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate and precuneus, and parts of the lateral parietal cortex)
  9. 3.Buckner, R.L., Andrews-Hanna, J.R., and Schacter, D.L. (2008). "The brain's default network: anatomy, function, and relevance to disease." Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1124(1), 1-38. https://doi.org/10.1196/annals.1440.011 (review synthesizing studies of varying quality)
  10. 14.Lembke, A. (2021). Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence. Dutton.

This topic carries 14 notes in the research manuscript; the 10 above are those behind the material on this page. Full source register.