You probably notice how often your phone pulls you out of the present moment. You check it while waiting in line, before a conversation ends, after a pause in your thoughts. That pattern is not incidental. It reflects a deeper shift in how you experience boredom and what your mind does when it is not preoccupied with notifications or scrolling.
Manoush Zomorodi, a journalist and host of NPR’s TED Radio Hour and the Body Electric series, has spent years examining how our digital habits shape what we think and how we think.
Her book Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self and its later edition Spark: How to Free Your Brain from Technology to Ignite Your Creativity explore the research and lived experience behind boredom, creativity, attention, and distraction.
Her work began with a simple but unsettling observation: people rarely let their minds idle anymore. When you feel a moment of nothing to do, you reach for a phone. That action replaces a period of internal processing with external stimulation. In her 2015 project that gave the book its name, Zomorodi invited listeners to observe their phone use and intentionally create moments without digital input. “I was shocked that 20,000 people signed up,” she said at the time on her podcast Note To Self, and participants reported new ideas, deeper reflection, and changes in their routines simply by introducing small breaks from constant connectivity.
One clear pattern from that research was how rarely boredom arises on its own now. Zomorodi points to scientific work showing that when people are bored, their brains activate a network associated with creativity and planning. In Bored and Brilliant she writes that “boredom is the gateway to mind-wandering,” which helps your brain solve problems and generate insights.
She quotes neuroscientific research showing that when your mind is unoccupied, you engage the “default mode,” a mental state where you make sense of your world and set goals — the kind of thinking that leads to original ideas. “When our minds wander, we activate something called the default mode,” she explains, “the mental place where we solve problems and generate our best ideas.”
In her TED talk TED talk How Boredom Can Lead to Your Most Brilliant Ideas Zomorodi describes how constant connectivity and smartphone addiction inhibit creativity and cognitive function. She highlighted how people often fill every empty moment with their phones, depriving their minds of the very downtime that leads to generative thought.
Zomorodi’s inquiry later evolved. Her Body Electric series moves beyond creativity and attention to examine how the Information Age affects your body and brain physically and mentally. This work reflects broader concerns about the human consequences of long hours spent in front of screens and in sedentary positions.
In reporting for Body Electric, which is the result of a large collaboration involving thousands of participants, she has explored how our screen-filled lifestyles shape the way our bodies function. “It’s my journey through the human body to understand its relationship to our technology, to our habits, and what we need to do about it,” Zomorodi said in an interview about the project’s goals.
Her reporting includes working with experts to understand how prolonged sitting, screen focus, and repetitive posture affect energy, stress, and physical health. In one segment she described her own experiment sitting at a desk for a full day. She found her concentration faltering and her body complaining, leading her to question how much of our physical state is shaped by adaptation to screens.
Zomorodi’s work also examines the way digital habits influence stress, sleep, and overall physical well-being. She spoke with researchers about how the position your body takes when using devices can contribute to tension and strain, and how small changes in movement may offset some of these effects. “Slouching and hunching will give you tight muscles, maybe a lower backache,” she reported after interviewing a neurobiology expert.
Another thread in Body Electric is the rise of what Zomorodi and collaborators call “artificial intimacy.” As generative AI becomes more capable and accessible, Zomorodi has investigated how relationships formed with AI companions — whether chatbots posing as personal coaches or supportive friends — affect human emotional life. In one report she tried multiple types of AI companions and found them surprisingly easy to engage with, leading her to ask whether positive effects matter even if the connection is with a machine.
She interviewed MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle about how people use AI to feel understood or supported. Some listeners turn to bots for companionship because it is easier or more accessible than forming human connections. These interactions raise questions about how intimacy is changing in an era where a sense of emotional connection can be simulated by software.
Zomorodi’s follow-up work reinforces a key idea from her earlier research: how you interact with technology matters not just for your productivity and creativity but for your physical and emotional experiences. When you create space away from screens — whether to be bored, to move your body, or to connect with people in person — you allow processes to unfold that constant stimulation can interrupt.
Her reporting suggests that agents of physical and mental health are not found in dramatic digital detoxes but in intentional choices that give your attention and your body room to operate on their own terms.
Those choices create the conditions under which your most authentic thoughts, your bodily resilience, and your meaningful connections with others can emerge.
