In a study published in the summer of 2014, a team of psychologists at the University of Virginia left college students alone in a sparsely furnished room for 15 minutes, with a simple ask - do nothing. Earlier in the session, each student had received a mild electric shock and been asked whether they would pay to avoid another. The researchers kept only those who said they would. Then they left a button within reach. By the end of the quarter hour, twelve of the 18 men and 6 of the 24 women had shocked themselves at least once. One man pressed the button 190 times.
Blaise Pascal once wrote that all our unhappiness stems from our inability to sit quietly in a room. He wrote those words near the end of his brief and remarkable life. At 19, he designed a calculating machine to help his father, a royal tax official in Rouen.In the summer of 1654, he exchanged letters with Pierre de Fermat about how to divide the stakes of a game of chance interrupted before its end, a correspondence now counted among the founding documents of probability theory. That November, on the night of the 23rd, from about half past ten until about half past midnight, something happened to him that he recorded on a piece of paper.
