Timothy D. Wilson is the Sherrell J. Aston Professor of Psychology at University of Virginia. He is the author of Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change and Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious, which according to The New York Times Magazine contained one of the best 100 ideas of 2002. He has also published over 100 articles in scholarly journals and edited books, primarily on self-knowledge, unconscious processing, and applications of social psychology to addressing social problems. Wilson received the William James Fellow Award from the Association for Psychological Science and the Donald T. Campbell Award from the Society of Personality and Social Psychology.
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While the act of spacing out has long been attributed to fueling creativity, many of us are downright uncomfortable with being bored. In fact, a prominent social science study...