Des Fitzgerald, “Inter/Experiments.”

摘要

The first time I participated in a psychological experiment on mind-wandering, I wasso bored that I actually can’t remember it all that well. This might not say much for myskills as an empirical social scientist, but in my defense I will say that: (1) when Iparticipated it was not actually as a social scientist; I was just helping someone out; butmore importantly (2) I can at least recall my dominant affective state – which is to say:boredom, annoyance, frustration – even if the details of what I actually did, thesubstantive content of the experiment, remain vague. I remember that I was sat in frontof a laptop for an hour (?) and I had to look at some kind of shape, appearing anddisappearing on the screen, with an instruction to click when one shape was slightlydifferent from the previous – something like that, but in truth, it’s all a bit fuzzy. I justremember it being intensely boring, really excessively boring – as if someone had goneout of their way to design an experiment so mind-crushingly tedious that your thoughtsinevitably began to wander elsewhere, and yet requiring, at irregular intervals, justenough of your attention, calling you back with just that little occasional tap of thefinger, that some part of you always remained, somehow, present.