This book offers a unique perspective on the topic of boredom, with chapters written by diverse representatives of various mental health disciplines and philosophical approaches. On one hand, studying boredom involves the mental processes of attention, memory, perception, creativity, or language use; on the other, boredom can be understood by taking into account many pathological conditions such as depression, stress, and anxiety. This book seeks to fill the knowledge gap in research by discussing boredom through an interdisciplinary dialogue, giving a comprehensive overview of the past and current literature within boredom studies, while discussing the neural bases and causes of boredom and its potential consequences and implications for individual and social well-being.
Chapters explore the many facets of boredom, including:
Understanding the cognitive-affective mechanisms underlying experiences of boredom
Philosophical perspectives on boredom, self-consciousness, and narrative
How boredom shapes both basic and complex human thoughts, feelings, and behavior
Analyzing boredom within Freudian and Lacanian frameworks
Boredom Is in Your Mind: A Shared Psychological-Philosophical Approach is a pioneering work that brings together threads of cross-disciplinary boredom research into one comprehensive resource. It is relevant for graduate students and researchers in myriad intersecting disciplines, among them cognitive psychology, cognitive neurosciences, and clinical psychology, as well as philosophy, logic, religion, and other areas of the humanities and social sciences.
Dr. Josefa Ros Velasco is Associate and Teaching Assistant in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University and Real Colegio Complutense at Harvard Postdoctoral Fellow. She is conducting a multidisciplinary research on the evolution of the understanding of boredom as a mental pathology. As part of this approach, she is examining how the comprehension of boredom in terms of a mental disease has gradually formed historically by paying attention to philosophical, theological, and literary narratives. Dr. Ros Velasco holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy with International Mention at the Excellent Program of Doctorate in Philosophy at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM, Spain), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Culture and Education. Her Dissertation was entitled Boredom as a Selective Pressure in Hans Blumenberg, with which she got the Extraordinary Doctorate Award (2016-2017). MA in Contemporary Thinking and MA in Teachers Training. Shewas visiting researcher at the Internationales Zentrum für Kultur- und Technikforschung at Stuttgart Universität (IZKT, Germany) as a DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) scholar, and at the Deutsches Literatur-Archiv Marbach (DLA, Germany) as a DLA fellow. She is a member of the Research Groups Saavedra Fajardo Library for Hispanic Political Thought at the UCM; History and Video Games at the University of Murcia; and History and Philosophy of Emotions at CCHS-CSIC. She is the editor and the author of academic papers such as “Hans Blumenbergs’ Philosophical Anthropology of Boredom” (Karl Alber, 2018), “Boredom: humanising or dehumanising treatment” (Vernon, 2018); or “Boredom: A Comprehensive Study of the State of Affairs” (Thémata, 2017). She is currently working on her next books: La enfermedad del aburrimiento. El camino de la medicalización y sus alternativas, The Culture of Boredom (Brill, 2019), and The Faces of Depression inLiterature (Peter Lang, 2019).
