Some evidence for this can be seen in semiconscious behaviours, like doodling during a dull class, braiding strands of hair, folding notebook paper into odd shapes.

Daydreaming too can be a kind of constructive self-entertainment, psychologists say, especially if the mind is turning over a problem. In experiments in the 1970s, psychiatrists showed that participants completing word-association tasks quickly tired of the job once the obvious answers were given; granted more time, they began trying much more creative solutions, as if the boredom “had the power to exert pressure on individuals to stretch their inventive capacity,” Dr Belton said.

In the past few years, a team of Canadian doctors had the courage to examine the fog of boredom as it thickened before their (drooping) eyes. While attending lectures on dementia, the doctors, Kenneth Rockwood, David B Hogan and Christopher J Patterson, kept track of the number of attendees who nodded off during the talks.

They found that in an hour-long lecture attended by about 100 doctors, an average of 16 audience members nodded off. “We chose this method because counting is scientific,” the authors wrote in their seminal 2004 article in The Canadian Medical Association Journal.

Dr Rockwood, a professor of geriatric medicine at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, said when the material presented is familiar, as a lot of it was, then performance is everything. “Really, what it comes down to,” he said, “is that if you have some guy up there droning on, it drives people crazy.”

... contd.