How hard could it be to sit still silently for 15 minutes, free from any distraction (phone, I-Pod, books, and so on)? Apparently, for some people it is harder than not to zap themselves multiple times. In last March, a research team at University of Virginia devised an interesting experiment to measure pleasantness we feel in complete absence of distraction. The test was carried out through 11 trials, and all 146 participants were chosen from college students. For each trial, the participants were asked to occupy their minds only with their own thoughts for 6 minutes and later on rate the difficulty according to their experiences. The instructors did not give any specific topic or subject for the participants to concentrate upon; the only one rule required of them was not to leave their original sitting positions or fall asleep during the test. As reading through the report, I found myself scoffing at the silliness of this seemingly effortless test, saying “I love being left to my own thoughts, especially in my physics class.” However the responses showed a rather interesting outcome. 58% admitted that the test was intermediate or hard, as 42% reported that the experience of being alone with thought was not enjoyable. More interestingly, on the 7th trial, researchers theorized that the setting of their laboratory made the participants nervous and mentally unstable, and ordered them to go home and finish the test online, while the rules still applied. Contrary to the researchers’ belief, still about 32% of the participants confessed that they did not follow the given direction by listening to music, checking email, and chatting to friends, and in addition, the level of pleasantness actually decreased when the test was done at home. So nervousness and familiarity are proven irrelevant in this study. Wait, are you thinking right now that the participants expressed discomfort in spending time in their thoughts, because the subjects of the experiment were “college students” who are so exposed and attached to the modern technology that they could not stand being without it even for 6 minutes? Hold on to that idea for a minute! The team of the researchers had the same suspicion in their minds and selected a different group of participants from a farmer’s market and a local church for the exactly identical study, whose average age was 48 years. The researchers repeated the trial 7th with this group under the same rule. The difference of level of pleasantness experienced by the former group and latter group was insignificant, and it was concluded that there is no direct link between participants’ age or dependency on the modern technology and the degree to which participants enjoy 6 minutes of solitude with their own thoughts. So after this study, Timothy Wilson, the lead researcher, was like “Well, it’s obvious that we can’t even just zone out for 6 minutes. Clearly people do not like having nothing to do as much as they claim they do, but I am kinda curious what they would do rather than doing nothing at all.” Then he came up with this new brilliant experiment. For Mr. Wilson’s next test, which was divided in two parts, he gathered 55 undergraduate students. In part 1, all participants received electric shocks, a negative stimulus (intensity of the shock is described as “unpleasant but not painful”), and after being shocked electronically, they were given this following question: If you had $5, how much, if any, would you be willing to spend not to experience the shocks again? In part 2, those who reported that they would pay to avert shocks next time (42 out of 55) continued on in the test. Every condition and objective of the test was identical to that of the initial test, but in this test, the length of doing nothing but thinking extended to 15 minutes, and the participants could receive electronic shocks upon their requests. The result of this study was even more incredible than previous ones.
A number of the participants chose negative stimulation (electronic shocks) over no stimulation at all. Put differently, it was found that the people would likely zap themselves rather than steadily thinking for 15 minutes. I think it is important to remind you that those participants were ones who said they would sacrifice some amount, or all, of $5 not to get shocks again. In reality, many of them could not follow their own words. One guy issued 190 shocks to himself during the test. With these astonishing results about our inability to steer our own minds for a few minutes free from disturbance, Mr. Wilson suggests one possible answer to all of us. It’s evolution’s fault. He believes that one plausible guess could be that mammals have evolved to monitor their environments for dangers and opportunities, and so focusing completely internally for several minutes is unnatural. And later he added that the participants displayed some considerable improvement by practice of meditation in the later studies. This phenomenal discovery was also covered in “The Week” magazine by Damon Linker who cast a different light on the finding of the study. Linker explained in his piece that perhaps we humans eagerly chase after diversions and distractions, regardless of place and time, because state of nothingness imposes upon us our finite and temporal nature, immortality, and death. “We care deeply, almost infinitely, about ourselves, our lives, our loved ones. And the prospect of losing it all — of the world and everything in it winking out of existence when we cease to be — is unspeakably horrifying.”, he wrote in his article. After reading several articles about the issue from different sides, I have my own speculation on this: Maybe we aren’t just used to it. Living in a world where new I phones are coming out every year, pretty much all movies are sequels, and people in Michigan have an access to what is happening in China, we simply do not find it necessary to invest our time in meditation. I cannot remember the last time I sit on a chair ruminating upon choices I made in the past and reflecting on meaning of my existence for 15 minutes, not because doing so frightens me to the point where my head is filled with depressing thoughts about life and death, but because I just do not see the point. We are creatures of habit, and we modify ourselves to adopt to the ever changing environment around us. That is it. If time comes when it benefits us more to ponder on our thoughts and mind than to constantly move around and trying different things, I have little doubt that the result would be radically different.
Reference:
“The sheer terror of being alone with our thoughts”
http://theweek.com/article/index/264759/the-sheer-terror-of-being-alone-with-our-thoughts
“People Prefer Electric Shocks to Being Alone With Their Thoughts”
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/07/people-prefer-electric-shocks-to-being-alone-with-their-thoughts/373936/