Taking care of small children doesn’t exactly tax the brain. Most days
involve a variety of repetitive activities that are far from
stimulating, if almost totally mind numbing. Recently I was at a
friend’s whose parents live with her so they can be around her kids.
Her parents are child psychologists and there are no two more dedicated
people when it comes to the face time, but for the mind numbing stuff
like laundry, toy sorting and meals, her mother straps on a fanny pack
and walks around listening to books on tape. I was pretty impressed
when she told me how many books she’d “read” so far this summer because
it takes me weeks to creep through page-turning novels. But then on Tuesday I opened up the Science section of The New York Times to find a story making a case for my totally disengaged brain. The idea of the piece
was that boredom’s kind of a good thing because “falling into a numbed
trance allows the brain to recast the outside world in ways that can be
productive and creative…”
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