Verified by 
Thinking is not a bloodless affair—it can be intensely painful or gratifying. Moreover, the feelings of thinking matter; they’re consequential because they shape how we choose to use our mind. It’s a simple biological formula: stop thinking that feels bad and pursue thinking that feels good. For the most part, the carrot and stick routine has served us well throughout human history. Yet some of us are prodded into unhealthy places; especially now that we have to contend with realities evolutionary forces never prepared us for.
Feelings tell us how we are doing, sort of like ongoing state of affairs updates: “all good … steady as she goes,” or “warning…change course immediately.” Simply put, a feeling is the positively or negatively toned experience of being ourselves in the world. More technically we might say a feeling is a prelinguistic awareness of body-mind activity that both synthesizes and situates us.
We are well acquainted with the feelings of emotions. An urge to lash out, churning in our stomach, tightened fists, a racing heart, and a felt sense of transgression, for example, are easily recognized as the tell-tale feelings of anger. Indeed, it is important that we feel our emotions because emotions organize responses to critical events that can mean the difference between life and death. But we feel much more than our emotions. We feel satiated after thanksgiving turkey, we feel comforted by a mug of hot chocolate after a long autumn hike and, although we may not often stop to realize, we feel our thinking.
Consider, for example, the satisfying ‘aha’ moment when we solve a problem or the feeling of ease as we fluently read well-composed text. On the flip side, we feel the strain of mental effort as we struggle to stay focused on a difficult task. Research has shown that simply thinking in a rapid and variable way, such as during a brainstorming session, can induce a good feeling. Whereas the slow and repetitive thinking characteristic of ‘writers block’ can leave us feeling unhappy.
The key point of these examples is that ‘how’ we are thinking, not ‘what’ we are thinking, gives rise to feelings. Certainly, thinking about upsetting things can make us feel bad, but as far as feelings go it can also come down to how we think.
When our thinking processes unfold in particular ways, we have distinct feelings. Boredom, in our view, is a prime example. Boredom is what it feels like when we want to, but fail to, engage our mind. It’s the feeling arising from a failure to deploy our cognitive capacity such that we have surplus, unused cognitive potential. The discomfort of boredom gets our attention, ‘tells’ us we are in danger of stagnating and motivates us to become mentally engaged. Feelings of thinking, like boredom, provide feedback on how the thinking process is going, allowing us to make adjustments.
The fact that feelings of thinking provide useful feedback on thinking, and that boredom in particular can be beneficial, has not been lost on artificial intelligence (AI) researchers. In fact, it turns out that if you want to make a truly intelligent machine you have to give it the capacity to experience something akin to boredom—AI has to notice, and care about, squandering computational resources.
Surprisingly, researchers even discovered, in at least one case, that a boredom prone AI outperformed a curiosity-driven AI. When learning to navigate a maze, curious AI, got stuck and failed to complete its mission if one wall of the maze contained a virtual TV screen with constantly changing content. Gazing into the ever-changing array of random images satisfied the AI’s drive for curiosity and so it sat; immobilized. A boredom-prone AI, by contrast, would eventually get bored by the meaningless noise, which failed to further its goals. It would move on to more fully, and productively, deploy its computational capacity.
Of course, our thinking is not only shaped by the directive to become mentally engaged – sometimes it’s best to disengage; and another feeling of thinking, the strain of mental effort, gets that job done. Mental effort is what it feels like when automatic, low-level cognitive processes are not sufficient to maintain a chosen mental activity, and instead we have to rely on higher-level executive control systems to stay engaged. The feeling of mental effort provides feedback telling us we will have to try harder, accept poorer performance, or cut our losses and pick a different, less taxing activity. More often than not, if the strain of effort and the ensuing fatigue keeps rising, we will call it quits.
Given diminishing returns on our investment of mental effort, it is adaptive that we do, eventually, call it quits. The fact that mental effort feels uncomfortable protects us from the costs of overinvestment and redirects our mental capacity to activities that have more utility. In fact, one model of mental effort suggests it is the direct feeling of opportunity cost calculations. Although the various models of mental effort differ in important ways, they converge on the notion that mental effort is a feeling of thinking that motivates disengagement from the task at hand.
The feelings of thinking provide real-time feedback about the state of our mental processes and motivate changes in those mental processes. Boredom motivates us to become mentally engaged and mental effort motivates us to disengage. And another feeling of thinking, fluency, which is associated with easy and effective information processing, motivates us to stay the course. Combined, the various feelings of thinking push us towards a sweet spot of optimal engagement. Without such feelings, we might stagnate, overinvest in low utility activity, or fail to persist. These feelings of thinking have likely served us well over our long evolutionary history.
But things have changed with the advent of Attention-Grabbing Machines. Just as we struggle to cope well with ever-present and easily accessible rich, fatty foods because our biology and feeling states were not optimized for such excess, so too we struggle to cope well with the allure of attention-grabbing machines. In fact, our feelings of thinking make us an easy mark.
Attention-grabbing machines promise, and deliver, a salve to our weary mind – boredom and mental effort are eased; we are effortlessly and painlessly carried along by fluent information processing. It’s no wonder we find it so hard to resist; it feels so good. Until it doesn’t.
On Aug. 3, 2005, Lee Seung Seop went to an internet café in South Korea and sat down in front of one of his favourite attention-grabbing machines—StarCraft, a real time strategy computer game. Fifty hours later he fell from his chair, dropped to the floor, and died. Reportedly, he ate and drank very little and only left his chair briefly to use the washroom during his marathon gaming session. Doctors believe heart failure brought on by dehydration and exhaustion was the cause of death. But his undoing had been in the works for weeks before that fateful day. Friends and family had noticed but were unable to help him pull out of his destructive spiral.
Lee Seung Seop’s case is an extreme outlier to be sure. Yet it illustrates our vulnerability to the highly absorbing state that has been termed ‘dark flow.’ We’ve likely all experienced it, at least to a mild degree. It can start innocently enough. We want to see how our friend’s holiday to South America is going. We want to connect and celebrate with them. Eventually though, scrolling through one photo after another becomes an end in itself. We become caught in a feedback loop of photo, scroll, more photos, it’s strangely soothing and compelling. Then it becomes all about the scrolling for scrolling’s sake. And when the trance ends, we find ourselves, 90 minutes later, half-way across the internet watching a Samurai Warrior dancing to FatBoy Slim because … why not.
Attention-grabbing machines, and the dark flow they engender, get us into trouble because they exploit our feelings of thinking without offering back any real meaning or mastery. Worthwhile endeavors, that have meaning to us, typically require tolerating some boredom and mental effort. And, experiencing fluency with such activities doesn’t happen overnight, it requires dedication to skill development. But attention-grabbing machines offer a short cut giving us an effortless taste of flow. We can easily get seduced by the good feelings and lose sight of what we deeply want and need to be doing.
Feelings of thinking are much like feelings of emotions in that they serve a purpose and can be an important guide to the good life. But we need to understand and regulate our feelings or we will struggle. Recognizing the feelings that arise specifically from thinking, and that such feelings determine how we use our mind, can ultimately make us better thinkers.
