Time flies when you’re having fun. The feeling of fun is a flooding of consciousness to the sensory neurons, which means it’s allocated from somewhere else, like your timekeeping neurons.
Imagine you are chilling on a park bench when suddenly a guy starts to juggle flaming swords across the courtyard. You watch the juggler, amazed that he grabs the handles each time. Despite his constant successes, you still half expect him to mess up at any point.
At this moment, much of your consciousness is allocated to gathering visual information as each sword is caught and thrown again. The juggler completes his act, unharmed, and receives applause from a captivated audience.
The members of the audience, like you, were collecting a lot of visual information and anticipating a potential accident. You all had fun while the performance was going on because you were all gathering visual information from moment to moment while the swords were flying. You were fully “in the moment.”
Thrilling events are fun because you are forced to be in that moment. You have to be constantly gathering visual, auditory or muscular information and putting out signals with very quick turnover. Playing games is fun because you have to be ready to take in and put out signals that your competitors must then take in and put out for themselves. Playing sports allocates the consciousness to the senses as well as the body to perform the necessary movements.
Keeping yourself at the ready to take in the information and put out a stimulus requires a lot of consciousness to accomplish. The synapses being formed by taking in sensory information releases the pleasure you feel when you’re having fun.
When your consciousness is allocated to your sensory neurons but there is not much information to synapse, you will yearn for the pleasure release. It’s a similar drive to completion: knowing that synapses are not forming makes you want to form them. We are the Pleasure Seekers. This feeling is rather uncomfortable since you are wanting pleasure that you cannot get at that moment; we call the uncomfortable feeling boredom.
Before we go any further with boredom, I’d like to reiterate the idea of habituation. Habituation is when a neural path becomes solidified enough for the Organism to expect the path to fire, the expectation to stimulate the path means that the consciousness can ignore it. If you put on a shirt, you expect to feel the shirt on your skin so eventually your consciousness stops paying attention to the feeling of cloth on your chest.
Boredom is the result of a lack of stimulation of neural paths and can worsen from a greater expectation of fun. If you are constantly able to access stimulation, you will become habituated to it which means you’ll need more stimulation to reach the same amount of fun. This results in your boring moments becoming even more boring relative to when you are stimulated.
We absolutely hate being bored and will try to add stimulus to remove the boredom. When stimulus is added, whether it be food, music, gossip, exercise, etc., the consciousness can experience more synapsing of neural paths. Both consumption and production require a great amount of consciousness. Don’t just get stuck in a rut of consuming because the boredom is waiting to strike once it’s over.
It’s quite simple to understand: we are having fun when we are synapsing new neural paths and we are bored when we are not making new synapses. We like to have fun and hate being bored, which means we like forming synapses and hate when they aren’t stimulated.
Another word for forming synapses is learning. In my opinion, our purpose is to learn as much as we can. Based on our pleasure seeking tendencies, I think the Organism would agree with that purpose.