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Bored Out of Your Mind at Work?

Dan Cable | 5:36

Transcript

Well, about two years ago, I stumbled on a piece of neuroscience that just stunned me. As a psychologist, I wish somebody had told me more about this. But what I learned is that there appears to be a part of our brain called the ventral striatum. That's the technical term. Or you also could call it the seeking system.


And this system is urging us to explore the boundaries of what we know. It's urging us to be curious. And by the way, I mean innately, I mean, children six months old, three months old. If you give them some toy, they love it for a little while, as they get used to it, your car keys become more interesting. It's the new. And it's the desire to learn. And evolutionarily, this system was developed to help us to keep us learning. And so when I learned about this seeking system, it really turned me on, because it started to give me an insight into why disengagement from boring work, that may not be a bug, that might be a feature. In the 2015 2016, Gallup polls, the evidence is that about 70% of people are not engaged in what they do all day long.


And about 18% of people are repulsed, they're actively disengaged from what they do. And I think that the reason why I say this is a problem, and it could even be caught an epidemic, is because work is mostly what we do, we spend so much more time at work than with our families. And then there's things called hobbies.


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