James Danckert

Cognitive neuroscientist, university-of-waterloo — Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience, trained as a clinical neuropsychologist in Australia (PhD, La Trobe University, 2000). Runs two lines of research he describes as largely independent: boredom and mental model updating (the latter growing out of work on neglect syndrome after right-parietal brain damage). He came to boredom research through traumatic-brain-injury patients who reported feeling bored more often after injury — an organic change in brain function, in his account, not a mood.

Co-author with john-eastwood of Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom (Harvard University Press, 2020) and co-author, with wanja-wolff, maik-bieleke and Sarah Martarelli, of "A Primer on the Role of Boredom in Self-Controlled Sports and Exercise Behavior" (Frontiers in Psychology, 2021) — the paper that connects him directly to two of the researchers he cites in the-joy-of-writing rather than citing them as strangers.

Writes the Modern Boredom blog at psychology-today (previously The Engaged Mind). In the-joy-of-writing he discloses a financial stake in the argument he is making: he expects to benefit from a settlement against anthropic over its unauthorized use of Out of My Skull to train models, and states his opposition to "the theft of work to build AI models" outright rather than leaving it for a reader to discover.

Related

the-joy-of-writing · john-eastwood · university-of-waterloo · cognitive-miser · maik-bieleke · wanja-wolff