 Hello, when were you last bored? I wonder how often you feel bored, that feeling that your head isn't engaged with anything. My guess would be that if you're somebody who carries with you a smartphone or a tablet computer, that doesn't happen very often. So I'm going to talk about how boredom can be good for the imagination and how therefore we shouldn't attempt to escape it or void it by using screens of any kind. And why is this important? Well, imagination is important. I think we can all agree on that. It enriches the individual's life and I'd also say it enhances our collective life, social, political, in every area. And what I'm going to say is based on two pieces of research that I've done. One I carried out in the 1990s and the other was much more recent. So, first of all, what is imagination? I understand it to be the ability to create new forms and structures by making new connections between knowledge, perceptions, impressions, thoughts, observations and other memories. How memories can be cognitive, emotional or sensuous. They might be conscious or they might be deeply buried. When we come across a creation of some kind, we judge its imaginativeness by whether there's something unexpected about it. I think that something is imaginative if it gives us something of a surprise. So then, what is boredom? It's a lack of stimulus or a lack of engagement with whatever stimulus there might be around. So, there are lots of different kinds of boredom and the word boredom is used in many different ways to mean different things. But one form of boredom is clearly a repetitive or uninteresting task that you have to do that simply doesn't engage you. And that is one kind of bad boredom. But another kind of experience we have that we tend to call boredom is finding that we have nothing to do. So, the first time I began to see imagination and boredom under the same umbrella was 15 years ago after I had researched the influence of television on children's story making. I read about 400 stories written by 10 to 12-year-old children in five very different schools and I studied 36 of the children in some detail. Now, television is a narrative medium. It's full of stories and it takes us to places and situations real and imaginary that we're not familiar with from everyday life. And so, I expected to find quite a degree of influence of television on children's stories. But there was less than I expected. What I found was that the principal source of content in children's stories was their own direct personal experience, be that physical, social, emotional or cultural. I also found, somewhat to my surprise because I had thought that children are naturally imaginative that actually a lot of their stories were pretty unimaginative. So, let me give you two examples. I don't expect you to try and read this but it just gives you a little taste of the kind of thing that I saw when I read through these 400 or so stories. And I'll read you the beginning of it. The day before yesterday it was very cold. I was also very bored. There was nothing to do. I was sitting on my bed and because I was so bored I drawed a face on the window in the water vapor that had settled there. The strange thing was that the face was still there today. Just as I was about to start getting dressed, something caught my eye. Had the face on the window blinked? When I got to school I told my best friend Rob all the things from the beginning were decided to keep a record of what it did. When two weeks had passed the face still hadn't gone. According to our records said Rob, it blinks when one of us eats porridge and when one of us eats marshmallows. I consulted mum on this one. When I asked her she said, that used to be Uncle Burt's favourite food. He had a sad ending though. He committed suicide out of your very window. Maybe it was Uncle Burt's ghost. So that was written by an 11-year-old boy. Here's a part of a story, beginning of a story by a 12-year-old girl. The first story had the title, The Face at the Window. This story has the title, By the Light of the Candle. One day Meg Smith decided to plan a sleepover. She asked her mum when her mum said, you can have three friends no more. Meg agreed and started to plan things. The sleepover was on the 22nd of August, almost today. The middle of the summer holidays. The 22nd was a Friday. It was the 20th, a Wednesday, and she had two days to organise it. Her friends would be coming at 10am on Friday. The friends she decided to have were Emma Jones, Isabella Johnson and Amy Timms. They were her closest friends. She phoned them up and they said they could come. Meg was pleased and his story goes on. The friends meet, they go shopping to buy accessories. They watch television. They go to bed until each other goes stories. Then there's a power cut and the lights go out. They find some candles and light them so they can see. One of them gets stuck down the toilet and they pull her out. That's the end of the story. What I found from looking at all these stories was that the degree of imaginativeness in stories lies along a spectrum. At the less imaginative end, you find imitative imagination. At the more imaginative end, you find transformative imagination. Both the stories that I've read to you were based on these children's reel. They weren't stories that had any television influence on them at all. I think you'll see how one of them transformed the child's experience into something completely new. Whereas the second one, although it recounted her experience not exactly as it was, it made an artifact out of it. It stuck much more closely to what she'd experienced. Given that I was researching the influence of television on children's story-making, I began to wonder whether that influence could actually have something to do with the lack of imaginativeness that I found in a lot of stories. Does television viewing stifle imaginative process more than it stimulates it? I looked back at previous research that had been done on the influence of television and imagination. I found three studies that seemed to me to be particularly relevant to this question. One study was carried out in Canada at the time that television was being introduced first of all. It was found that the more children became accustomed to viewing, the less imaginative they became. They were tested and they produced fewer imaginative ideas, new ideas of their own, as time went on and they watched more television. Then there's other research that shows that people consistently report their television experiences as relaxing and lacking in concentration. The third study showed that lighter television viewers amongst children used more complex language than the heavier viewers. I then tried to figure out why it might be that television doesn't appear on the whole to stimulate the transformative process. Although there were a few examples amongst the stories where I found that it had amongst particularly imaginative children who could take an element that they'd seen on the screen and turn it into something completely different, but they were very few and far between. So, if you think about it, television is full of ready-made, perfect, technically perfect, complete images which are very different from the kind of images that one has in one's head. One's hearing a story or imagining a story or imagining anything else for that matter. The kind of images that we have in our heads when we imagine something of very fluid and only slightly formed and difficult to pin down. So, I began to wonder whether, in fact, receiving a lot of ready-made images, as one does from the screen, somehow short circuits the imaginative process. Then, I've told you something wrong. Actually, one of the pieces of research done with children looking at the influence of television on their imagination was an experiment. It showed one group of children the beginning of a story in a television mode and asked them to complete it. Another group of children got the same beginning of the story just in a radio mode, so they just heard it. The children who just heard the story without seeing any visual images produced much more imaginative endings, i.e., they introduced elements into their stories which hadn't been in the bit that they'd been given. As I say, trying to figure out this whole transformative process, people report that television viewing is relaxing. There's nothing wrong with that. We all need to relax, and if television can help us to do that, that's fine. But as far as the imaginative process goes, perhaps if you become habituated to watching, if you watch a lot in this very relaxed way where you really don't concentrate, you then don't develop creative skills. Being creative requires a great deal of attention and concentration and effort, which is not what you get from watching television. The third thing is that, of course, when you're watching television, you're not doing other things. As I've said, what I found was the main content of children's stories was their own experience. So while they're in front of a screen, it's time when they're not actually accumulating their own direct personal experiences and creating a sort of memory bank or repertoire that they can draw on. So this is where boredom comes in. I think we find it an uncomfortable feeling being bored, feeling that there's nothing to do that our minds aren't engaged with anything. But if we try and escape that feeling or avoid it by pressing an on switch of one kind or another, we miss out on lots of potential opportunities. So boredom or having nothing to do, which is a term I actually prefer because I think it's more descriptive, more specific, gives us time to initiate and pursue our own occupations and thought processes. It gives us the opportunity to enjoy stillness, quiet and solitude. It allows us to daydream. It allows us to go out of doors or if not out of doors to move around and not have our eyes fixed on a tiny little area. And movement is very important to human beings. It gives us the opportunity to have face-to-face social interactions, eye-to-eye contact, pheromone to pheromone. It gives us the opportunity to observe, to observe the human life around us, the natural world and the built environment. And in doing that we use all the senses, not just the senses of sight and hearing. Not having anything to do gives us time to reflect, to assimilate our experience, to think about what we've learnt, to think about how we're feeling and why we're feeling that way, perhaps. And the opportunity to use our hands. Using our hands is very important. This applies to all of us, but it particularly applies to children, I think, because they come in some respects as empty vessels, and they are learning about the world from scratch, and they learn through their own direct experience. And for children in particular, time with nothing to do is time when they can play freely in an unstructured way following their own thinking and exploring. And this kind of free-plane exploration is known to stimulate the imagination. So, 20 years after I started my research into the influence of television on children's story writing, technology, of course, has moved into a whole new dimension. It's interactive and it's mobile. And there are many new types of creative activity that we can become involved with. It's accessible to almost everybody and you will be far more familiar with these than I am, I suspect. But there are also downsides to this new technology in the context of boredom and imagination. Recently, a colleague and I did a small piece of research having conversations with four professional people in the UK who are known for their creativity. And we learnt from them not only about boredom and creativity. We chose them because they had stated somewhere in the press that they found that boredom was beneficial for their creativity. So we talked to them about this and they told us not only about that, but they also told us about some perhaps worrying implications of interactive technology for imagination. So one of these people was Felix Dennis, who's a hugely successful millionaire businessman. And well into middle age, he found himself in hospital bed with nothing to do. And after three hours, he was so desperate. He looked around to see what on earth he could find to do. And the thing that he saw was some post-it notes on the nurses station. So he took those post-it notes and as he said to us, as you can't write a business plan or novel on a post-it note, I began to write poetry. He'd never thought about writing poetry before, but since then he's become an established and published poet and has toured with the Royal Shakespeare Company reading his poetry. Another was Susan Greenfield, the eminent neuroscientist at the University of Oxford. And she remembers many happy childhood hours drawing and writing stories. And she has a really interesting perspective on stories. She says, and we've heard this morning how important stories are for human life from Susanna. And what Susan Greenfield said to us about stories was they're important because they have a beginning, a middle and an end. Actions have consequences. And if you hear a story or read a story, you get to care about the characters in that story and what happens to them. But she pointed out, with randomly accessed material in cyberspace, these qualities are missing. Now writer and actor Mira Sayal told us about her child and I'll just read you a bit of what she said to us. She said, I spent hours staring out of the window across the fields. We had an amazing view across miles of green and woods and corn fields and I really learned how seasons and weather changed the landscape. Just watching the clouds change or the patterns, the huge flocks of birds made at different times of the day kept me busy for hours. Also, the boredom made me right. I started keeping a diary from a young age and filled it with observations, short stories and diatribes. I attribute that diary to me becoming a writer in later life. Enforced solitude alone with a blank page is a wonderful spur. He began to write because there's nothing to prove, nothing to lose, nothing else to do. It's very freeing, being creative for no other reason than you freewheel and fill time. Now, of course, that was a generation ago and in the age of social networking, real solitude and freedom from the gaze of others is unknown to many, both children and adults, and there's something to prove all the time. In Britain, social networking is the most important reason that children go online. So postings on sites such as Facebook and Twitter are instant on the whole. They're not deeply thought out thoughts and the primary motivation is to be seen or heard by others, not simply to commune with the self or to create something for its own sake. The fourth participant was Grayson Perry, the Turner Prize-winning artist. He is very concerned about people becoming externally referenced in their feelings rather than thinking about what they really feel themselves. Lastly, recently, novelist and blogger Neil Gaiman, who has 1.8 million Twitter followers, 500,000 Facebook friends and 1.5 million readers of his blog, has said that constant social networking makes boredom impossible and he feels this is bad for his creativity. So, in a recent interview with the Guardian newspaper, he said he finds that the best way to come up with new ideas is to get really bored and he has declared that he's going to have a six-month sabbatical from electronic connection. So, the story is the lesson is, I think, let's learn to welcome boredom and see where it takes us.