Main description:

This book offers a unique perspective on the topic of boredom, with chapters written by diverse representatives of various mental health disciplines and philosophical approaches. On one hand, studying boredom involves the mental processes of attention, memory, perception, creativity, or language use; on the other, boredom can be understood by taking into account many pathological conditions such as depression, stress, and anxiety. This book seeks to fill the knowledge gap in research by discussing boredom through an interdisciplinary dialogue, giving a comprehensive overview of the past and current literature within boredom studies, while discussing the neural bases and causes of boredom and its potential consequences and implications for individual and social well-being.

Chapters explore the many facets of boredom, including:

Understanding the cognitive-affective mechanisms underlying experiences of boredom
Philosophical perspectives on boredom, self-consciousness, and narrative
How boredom shapes both basic and complex human thoughts, feelings, and behavior
Analyzing boredom within Freudian and Lacanian frameworks

Boredom Is in Your Mind: A Shared Psychological-Philosophical Approach is a pioneering work that brings together threads of cross-disciplinary boredom research into one comprehensive resource. It is relevant for graduate students and researchers in myriad intersecting disciplines, among them cognitive psychology, cognitive neurosciences, and clinical psychology, as well as philosophy, logic, religion, and other areas of the humanities and social sciences.

Contents:

Chapter 1: Is it a Good Thing To Be Bored?.- Chapter 2: The Unbearable Lightness of Boredom: A Pragmatic Meaning-Regulation Hypothesis.- Chapter 3: Boredom: Managing the Delicate Balance between Exploration and Exploitation.- Chapter 4: Boredom Is A Feeling of Thinking and a Double-Edged Sword.- Chapter 5: Boredom and Psychoanalysis.- Chapter 6: The Transformative Potential of Boredom.- Chapter 7: Heidegger on Creativity: From Boredom to Reengagement with the World.- Chapter 8: Facing Boredom: Essential Indexicals and Narratives of the Self.- Chapter 9: Animal Boredom.- Chapter 10: The Helix Center Roundtable on Boredom (New York, April 2018).