To be left alone with our thoughts can be torture. Insomniacs who suffer agonies as they lie awake night after night soon learn that it is far better to get up and do something – anything – rather than thrash about with only their restless mind for company. Negative emotions such as guilt, self-doubt and anxiety run amok at night. Daylight, with its promise of mundane tasks and social interaction, usually sends these monsters of our imagination scurrying back to their caves, but they can re-emerge whenever there are no external distractions to occupy the mind.

Some people will go to extraordinary lengths to prevent this from happening, as a series of experiments carried out in 2014 by psychologists at Harvard and the University of Virginia demonstrated. College students were instructed to sit by themselves for up to 15 minutes in a sparsely furnished, unadorned room and “entertain themselves with their thoughts”. They were allowed to think about whatever they liked, the only rules being they should remain in their seats and stay awake. Unsurprisingly, a majority reported afterwards that they found it difficult to concentrate and their minds had wandered, with around half saying they didn’t enjoy the experience.

Being left alone in an empty room was so unpleasant that many opted to give themselves electric shocks

A follow-up experiment, however, revealed that many found being left alone in an empty room with nothing to occupy their minds so unpleasant (this is, after all, what makes solitary confinement such a harsh punishment) that they would rather give themselves electric shocks. First, the volunteers were asked to rate the unpleasantness of a shock delivered via electrodes attached to their ankle and say whether they would pay a small amount of money to avoid having to experience it again. In the second part of the experiment, during which they were left alone for 15 minutes, they were given the opportunity to zap themselves again. Amazingly, among those who had said they would pay to avoid it, 67% of the men (12 out of 18) and 25% of the women (6 out of 24) opted to shock themselves at least once. One of the women gave herself nine electric shocks. One of the men zapped himself 190 times.

In their report for the journal Science, the researchers write: “What is striking is that simply being alone with their own thoughts for 15 minutes was apparently so aversive it drove many participants to self-administer an electric shock that they had earlier said they would pay to avoid.”

This goes some way towards explaining why many people initially find meditation so frustrating, because to sit quietly with your eyes closed is to invite the mind to wander here, there and everywhere. In fact this is the whole point of the exercise, because learning to notice whenever your mind has wandered is the secret to calming it. We can roll our eyes at the (now all-pervasive) talk of mindfulness, but perhaps we’d be more open to it if we saw it as simply a way to survive the onslaught of our thoughts. Only by noticing the way they ricochet about inside our heads like balls in a pinball machine can we learn to observe them dispassionately and let them come to rest, resisting the urge to pull back the mental plunger and fire off more.

So the purpose of mindfulness and meditation is to develop the ability to quiet the mind at will. “Without such training,” the psychologists conclude drily, “people prefer doing to thinking, even if what they are doing is so unpleasant they’d normally pay to avoid it. The untutored mind does not like to be alone with itself.”



Siddhartha’s Brain by James Kingsland is published by Constable & Robinson on 2 June (£13.99). To buy a copy for £11.19, go to bookshop.theguardian.com