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Why do people voluntarily spend time struggling with problems like sudoku or crossword puzzles? According to neuroscientist Daniel Bor, a research fellow at the University of Sussex in England and author of the new book The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning, it’s because we take great pleasure in pattern-finding. What’s more, that conclusion has big implications for understanding the brain, consciousness and even neurological disorders like autism. We spoke with Bor recently.

Interesting interview. A selection of responses:

Human brains have an extreme form of consciousness: they’re ravenous for new innovative solutions to problems in the world, ravenous for optimizing our lives, for building pyramids of knowledge. I was trying to capture [the sense of hunger that] extreme forms of consciousness have about searching for knowledge and for understanding.

In terms of the mind, consciousness is the product of attention, so we can focus only on a small subset of the world that’s most important to us. It isn’t so much about automatic habits, which we are barely conscious of. Instead, it’s about trying to solve novel or complex problems. We have a mental space dedicated to complex problem solving. What makes human consciousness unique is our ravenous appetite for these innovative lessons that help us solve these novel or complex problems.

Choice is a huge separate issue. It can at least appear that we have choice. If I’m in a crowded train station, looking for my wife who is wearing red, I can constrain my attention by looking for red [and the parts of the brain that represent red are more likely to win] than any other bits.

Attention in the standard textbooks is divided into two kinds, one is voluntary, where we set some goal, and the other is extrinsic, where something in the environment takes over what we attend to. A looming animal coming straight at us — we wouldn’t have much choice in attending to that.

I think the purpose of it [consciousness] is to draw all the relevant information together in a larger space. It’s almost as if we can’t spot it because we are doing it all the time. Why do we love crossword puzzles and why are people addicted to sudoku? That’s what a huge bit of the cortex is primed to do — to spot [patterns] — and once we spot them we can assimilate them into our pyramid of knowledge and build more layers of strategy, and knowing how to do that makes us incredibly successful at controlling the world.

We get streams of pleasure when we find something that can really help us understand some deep pattern. Sudoku isn’t the most [fun activity], but it sure feels good when you put in that last number. It’s why scientists love doing research. The way I approach my job, it’s like trying to solve a really big fuzzy crossword puzzle and when you do put in that new clue and see the deeper pattern, that’s incredibly pleasurable.

Although boredom is often seen as a trivial and temporary discomfort that can be alleviated by a simple change in circumstances, it can also be a chronic and pervasive stressor that can have significant consequences for health and well-being.

Drawing from research across many areas of psychological science and neuroscience, Eastwood and colleagues define boredom as “an aversive state of wanting, but being unable, to engage in satisfying activity,” which arises from failures in one of the brain’s attention networks.

Specifically, we’re bored when:

• We have difficulty paying attention to the internal information (e.g., thoughts or feelings) or external information (e.g., environmental stimuli) required for participating in satisfying activity

• We’re aware of the fact that we’re having difficulty paying attention

• We believe that the environment is responsible for our aversive state (e.g., “this task is boring,” “there is nothing to do”).

The researchers are confident that integrating the disparate fields of cognitive neuroscience, social psychology, and clinical psychology will produce a more thorough understanding of boredom and attention—phenomena which are ubiquitous and intimately linked.

Armed with a precise and broadly applicable definition of boredom that gets at the underlying mental processes, the authors identify important next steps in research on boredom. Eastwood and his colleagues hope to help in the discovery and development of new strategies that ease the problems of boredom sufferers and address the potential dangers of cognitive errors that are often associated with boredom.

Every time you remember an event from the past, your brain networks change in ways that can alter the later recall of the event. So the next time you remember it, you might recall not the original event, but what you remembered the previous time.

“A memory is not simply an image produced by time traveling back to the original event — it can be an image that is somewhat distorted because of the prior times you remembered it,” said Donna Bridge, a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and lead author of the paper on the study recently published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

The findings have implications for witnesses giving testimony in criminal trials, Bridge noted. “Maybe a witness remembers something fairly accurately the first time because his memories aren’t that distorted,” she said. “After that it keeps going downhill.”

The reason for the distortion, Bridge said, is the fact that human memories are always adapting. “Memories aren’t static,” she noted. “If you remember something in the context of a new environment and time, or if you are even in a different mood, your memories might integrate the new information.”

A growing body of research, including new studies by Berkeley’s Juliana Breines and Serena Chen, suggest that self-compassion, rather than self-esteem, may be the key to unlocking your true potential for greatness.

Self-compassion is a willingness to look at your own mistakes and shortcomings with kindness and understanding — it’s embracing the fact that to err is indeed human. When you are self-compassionate in the face of difficulty, you neither judge yourself harshly, nor feel the need to defensively focus on all your awesome qualities to protect your ego. It’s not surprising that self-compassion leads, as many studies show, to higher levels of personal well-being, optimism and happiness, and to less anxiety and depression.

People who experienced self-compassion were more likely to see their weaknesses as changeable. Self-compassion — far from taking them off the hook — actually increased their motivation to improve and avoid the same mistake again in the future.

When your focus is instead on protecting your self-esteem, you can’t afford to really look at yourself honestly. You can’t acknowledge the need for improvement, because it means acknowledging weaknesses and shortcomings — threats to self-esteem that create feelings of anxiety and depression. How can you learn how to do things right when it’s killing you to admit — even to yourself — that you’ve done them wrong?