In Praise of Idleness
(sort of a book review)
In the ever growing department of “common wisdom gets scientific confirmation”, there is idleness, the cousin of laziness which we all hope to achieve though it seems this particular art was lost to the ancients of the 19th and 20th centuries. In a recent book titled Auto-Pilot, The Art & Science of Doing Nothing, Andrew Smart goes on a diatribe against over busyness in modern times, and offers a vulgarization of some recent discoveries in neuroscience about the non-busy brain. But it’s vulgarization done right.
Why Idleness?
Methinks the popularity of meditation can be attributed to the fact that it legitimizes idleness, much more so than any purported mystical, spiritual revelations. Sure, it helps one be one with the world, be happier, more thoughtful, gentler, peaceful. Just the same as laying on a couch, relaxing and looking at the wall. But with books and teachers on meditation, formal methods, stages of enlightenment and all the rest of the crap, nobody can tell you you are a couch potato. Yup, even doing nothing is a for fee activity in our times, with a small cottage industry around it.
We all need vacation, most of us have been through a burn out at some point in our lives. But this is not about rest. It is not about recharging batteries so that one could be more productive and get on with todo lists and objectives. Rather, it is about a part of being human that modern life attempts to do away with. It is about a societal neurosis that needs to stop, about workaholics who escape emotional pain through constant work, about over-achievement-oriented parenting where early exposure to science, sports and music is destroying the next generation of children who may well be the first with reduced life expectancy. Kids under 10 years of age walk about like zombies overburdened with activities, doing homework until 11pm because their last violin lesson ended at 8pm, only to wake up at 6am for another “great day”. What about just playing, doing nothing, hanging out?
Societal addiction to work/overwork can be traced back to Luther, the founder of Protestantism who believed that poverty was caused by laziness, that salvation was to be achieved only through a rigorous work ethic. But for all the modern tools and self-help books on super achievement and mutli-tasking, the human brain has evolved to focus on one task at a time. We are bad at doing things in parallel, and we are slow at context switching as well.
There are enough arguments for taking it easy even without solid experimental science. Idleness has traditionally been a status symbol. A Confucian gentleman grew long fingernails just to prove that he does not have to work. Nassim Taleb has a bunch of colorful aphorisms in his not-so-slightly pompous book The Bed of Procrustes like “My only measure of success is how much time you have to kill” and “The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free.” Blaise Pascal famously said that most problems of man stem from his inability to remain at rest in a room. There is of course a natural drive for humans to employ their time with constructive activities not driven by direct survival pressures. Maybe the superhuman of the future is the 24/7 multi-tasking cyborg. But until our brains evolve, idleness cannot be ignored.
So what’s that exciting neuroscience that justifies a book on the importance of being idle?
Neuro
As much as brain studies were exciting a few years ago due to the new methods of fMRI and similar techniques that allow us to correlate behavioral activity with neural activation, they have become an almost boring accumulation of unconnected factoids. When I’m doing X, a bunch of neurons here and there light up…duh. But out of the noise from the Ph.D. mills, there is a recent discovery that has the quality of a scientific chef-d’oeuvre. It turns out some neurons are getting real busy precisely when you are not. Now, we already knew that neurons are firing all the time, like a CPU that is constantly executing some instructions as long as there is electricity going through. But absent a specific task at hand, the assumption has been that what goes on is pure noise. Neurology researcher Marcus Raichle discovered that during awaken rest, like when you are starring at the wall and picking your nose, the brain enters into a very special state called the default mode network (or rest network):
Raichle’s research suggests that 90% of brain’s energy consumption goes to non-task oriented activity, in analogy with the discovery of the Universe’s dark energy which turns out to be most of the energy. Just as fMRI shows increased blood flow in certain brain areas when you are doing maths, it also shows increased activity in certain specific areas when you are doing nothing. To repeat: activity increases in those regions when you are idle. The do-nothing areas and the connections between them form the rest network. That’s already quite amazing. But the really fascinating part is what this default network is made of — it is made of the important neural hubs in your brain that are usually responsible for the different types of cognitive tasks we are capable of. You might have heard that various connectivity aspects of brain organization exhibit scale-free properties. What that means roughly is that there are very few highly connected areas, like airport hubs, and then a little more less connected ones, and then lots of not very connected ones. The physical connections are what forms the structural networks of the brain, but then at any given time different parts synchronize to do work in tandem even when they are not directly physically connected. Those are called functional networks. Functional networks are what makes you motor system act on a decision made by your pre-frontal cortex that used information stored in your hippocampus. The default mode network is a structural network of all the important hubs that you have and it becomes very active and energy demanding in the absence of a targeted task, i.e. when your mind wanders. And it shuts down as soon as you hit your to-do list. Because each hub comes from a distinct brain region, with a distinct cognitive function, this default network activation results in such fabulous experiences as self-consciousness, aha moments, creative sparks, the making of deeper connections between seemingly unrelated memories. This is because the structure of connected, functionally distinct hubs gives rise to many spontaneous functional networks that account for a coherent sense of self and play a crucial role in memory organization. Lack of rest means the default network never gets the chance to do its job which, besides truly making you dumber, has all sorts of adverse health effects, speculatively increasing your risk of degenerative cognitive disorders. So, learn to do nothing, and do nothing as much as possible!
Unlike other essays on the subject of rest where it is the negation of work that the author is after, because work is supposedly inherently painful or has other negative consequences, here the argument is a positive one: rest is not really rest, you are doing something, something very important and that cannot be done in any other way. One admittedly lame analogy of the default network getting in action would be corporate parties where people from different teams that usually don’t talk to each all of a sudden get together and connect otherwise disparate aspects of an organization. Or when cross-disciplinary groups tackling a problem from different perspectives. I like that much better than the idea that I have to meditate, whatever meditation is. I can easily sit still and watch the birds outside the window. I can think. I can think hard or I can just wonder, I can wander, I can do nothing easily, just don’t try to tell me how I should be doing it.
That’s the take away if you are too busy to read a hundred or so (small) pages of a booklet.
The book is good, read it!
But I recommend reading the book. It’s good pop science, written by an actual scientist so no journalistic crap. A lot of interesting relevant research is reported. It is very short, erudite, yet unpretentious. It touches on such diverse subjects as Rilke’s poetry, six-sigma training, ADHD and of course the economics of the modern Western workforce.
PS (on an unrelated subject)
I could easily conjecture that much of the failure of AI is due to the focus on online rather than offline processing. Goal-oriented tasks are actually easy because essentially you know what you need to be doing. Background errands is the hard part and what’s largely missing because it’s nearly impossible to frame them in terms of goals — there is no intrinsic fitness function discovered yet. More generally, one realizes that processing external information has been viewed as the problem to solve. But that’s not a problem at all, that’s what the senses (or sensors) do and that’s what we develop reflexes (or write if-then rules) for. Dealing with already acquired information, reorganizing, filtering, compressing so we can use it and not loose it has been left to…I don’t know…Moore’s law and cognitive performance enhancing drugs?
