If you’re sitting in a car that’s going fast, it becomes very hard to observe the houses that are passing by. The moment you try to pay attention to one, and look at the architecture deeply, another one pops up, and this one is away from the view.

To observe the architecture of a house, you will have to stop. You will have to look at it for a longer period of time than just a fleeting glance.

Looking at just one house does get boring pretty quickly, but that is precisely the thing that makes us pay proper attention to it.

When you’re bored, you are depriving your mind of dopamine hits. To fill that void, your mind starts paying more attention to the thing in front of you in the hopes of finding something that does give you a dopamine hit.

But when you’re not bored, your mind is occupied elsewhere, receiving dopamine from other sources, and so less inclined to invest effort in observing the thing in front of you.

And this is why I think that to find any insights, you first need to be bored.

Boredom makes you look for things you were unknowingly ignoring earlier. It makes your mind work extra hard, to uncover something engaging.

By slowing down, you get fresh perspectives on familiar sights.

Try it! Read this essay once, and then copy it by hand, typing, or writing each letter individually. One at a time.

I don’t know why, but I see things a bit differently when I copy each line, word by word, compared to simply reading them.

When reading, your brain skims a lot of information, to presumably preserve energy. But when you write, your brain lacks this luxury, forcing you to pay closer attention to the text, processing it in various ways.

Copying takes time, and your brain will start looking at things it previously overlooked, to search for potential dopamine hits. It will pay more attention to the text. Or it may wander around, and passively try to connect the dots with the text in front.

Slow Art Day writes on its website – “When people look slowly at a piece of art they make discoveries.”

Participants look at five works of art for 10 minutes each and then meet together over lunch to talk about their experience. That’s it!

I tried doing the same thing, it’s incredibly hard to do, but it’s a very meditative process. Do give it a try and observe the new things you pay attention to.

I am not a neurologist, so don’t think of it as scientific reason, but more of as a justification that I came up with for this behaviour.