As the authors of a new study note, the ability to sit and think may be one of the defining features of humanity. It's a necessary skill for any plan for the future and for detailed remembrances of the past, and it underlies all of art and literature. And, if their study is to be believed, we hate doing it so much that we're willing to self-administer electrical shocks in order to avoid being left alone with our thoughts.

The authors, based at Harvard and the University of Virginia, use a pretty simple structure for most of their experiments: put people in an empty room for six to 15 minutes and ask them to do nothing. Then, when they're done, ask them whether they enjoyed it. About half of them didn't. And, even though absolutely nothing was happening, people generally said they had a difficult time concentrating and that their mind tended to wander away from whatever they had decided to focus on.

Maybe it was something about the empty room, the researchers thought. So they asked people to set some time aside for thinking at home. In general, however, the participants enjoyed this even less, and about a third of them admitted they cheated and started checking their phones or browsing the Web. In fact, when given the opportunity to do these alternative activities, most people said they preferred them.

To truly get a grip on how much people hate being alone with their thoughts, the researchers asked some of their participants whether they'd pay to avoid getting an electric shock; most would. But then, given 15 minutes on their own in an empty room, two-thirds of the male participants ended up giving themselves a shock to avoid the tedium of their own company. (And that's after they removed the data from one guy who gave himself 190 shocks in the 15 minutes.) A quarter of the women involved also gave themselves a jolt.

"Being alone with their own thoughts for 15 min[utes] was apparently so aversive that it drove many participants to self-administer an electric shock that they had earlier said they would pay to avoid," as the authors put it.

What is it about having to sit and think that people find so awful? Personality profiles of the participants didn't reveal anything other than what you might expect: those who were easily bored had a harder time with it, while those who enjoy daydreaming cope much better. Beyond that, the authors just suggest that the brain is a difficult thing to control, and most people would rather just avoid the trouble.

Beyond what the authors suggest, the results may indicate that, although we complain that we're persecuted by things like smartphones and the constant barrage of e-mail, we actually may relish the distractions they bring. And, in terms of even broader perspectives, the study brings to mind a quote from Blaise Pascal: “All human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a room.”

DOI: 10.1126/science.1250830 (About DOIs).