Washington (AFP) - Many people would rather inflict
pain on themselves than spend 15 minutes in a room with nothing to do but
think, according to a US study out Thursday.
Researchers at the University of Virginia and
Harvard University conducted 11 different experiments to see how people reacted
to being asked to spend some time alone.
Just over 200 people participated in the
experiments. Some were college students, others were volunteers who ranged in
age from 18-77 and were recruited from a church and farmers' market.
Researchers asked them to sit alone in an unadorned
room, with no mobile phone, reading or writing materials, and then report back
on what it was like to entertain themselves with their thoughts for between six
and 15 minutes.
Turns out, more than 57 percent found it hard to
concentrate and 89 percent said their minds wandered.
About half found the experience was unpleasant.
"Most people do not enjoy 'just thinking' and
clearly prefer having something else to do," said the study in the journal
Science.
Cheating, self-shocking
Then, researchers turned their attention to what
people were doing to avoid being alone with their thoughts.
In one experiment, students were asked to do the
"thinking time" exercise at home.
Afterward, 32 percent reported they had cheated by
getting out of their chair, listening to music or consulting their mobile
phone.
Even more of the adults recruited from outside the
university -- 54 percent -- broke the rules, said co-author Erin Westgate, a
PhD student at the University of Virginia.
"And that's probably an underestimate, because
those are just the ones who were honest and told us afterward that they had
cheated," she told AFP.
Then researchers wondered how far students would go
to seek some stimulation while sitting alone with their thoughts.
An initial pilot study found, surprisingly, that
students preferred to hear the sound of a scraping knife to hearing no noise at
all.
"We thought, surely, people wouldn't shock
themselves," said Westgate.
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