If you’ve got nothing better to do for a few minutes because you’re, well, bored with the drama of the holidays or routines of life, pay attention as I address a question that almost never gets asked: Why do we get so easily bored in the first place?

Our ego defense mechanisms automatically shield us from other unpleasant emotions, so why does boredom get a pass and sneak through so often, along with its close cousins, ennui and malaise?

Boredom is one of those human traits, like appreciating humor or music or ocean views, that we take for granted without stopping to ask why we have those proclivities. The result is that we go through life preferring some things, eschewing others, and completely ignoring still others without asking why.

But if you desire less boredom in your life and a deeper understanding of why you are the way you are, read on.

There are two ways to understand boredom: through sensory neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. Let’s start with sensory neuroscience.

Our brains crave information to make essential decisions about food, shelter, mates, social bonds, and physical threats. And information, by definition, is all about change: changing patterns and colors of light, shifts in sound levels and pitch, shifts in smells, changing textures of things we touch. This is why our brains are wired to tune out steady-state conditions and amplify changes. A simple example is the famous Weber-Fechner law, ∆I/I =K, where the percent of stimulus intensity (∆I/I) needed to produce a just-noticeable difference in perception over the baseline level of stimulation remains constant throughout a wide range of stimulus intensity differences. At most stimulus levels, that is about 2 percent.

That’s why we see stars clearly at night when they are a few percent brighter than the night sky, but not during full daylight, even though they never go away. As dawn breaks, your brain gets “bored” with the faint light from stars and tunes........

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