Too lazy to read the science of lazy? Let your brain tell you why

For almost 2 weeks, I have been noticing that the timer in the gym I go to is off by 11 seconds. I have asked the staff to fix it but they could not get to it. Until the day that I asked someone why it was taking them so long to fix it.  He said it was because they had to figure out how to reprogram the timer.  So when no one was looking, I got a bench to stand on to reach the timer which was as big as a car battery and tried to figure it out. I fixed it in less than a minute and the timer is now back to being faithful to its name.

I am your poorest go-to person to have a machine fixed but I just couldn’t wrap around my head as to why a gym would not exert any effort to try to fix a timer that they needed. In the gym were very young men and women who were healthy enough to flex the same muscles I did to correct the problem but they chose not to – for 2 weeks.

What could be happening to our brains when we are showing apathy – a lack of motivation to decide to act. In other words, if mom were to say it – why are you so lazy?

While science may not be able to tell your mom why you are lazy, it could probably point to some clues as to what could be happening or not happening in your brain when you are being lazy. A recent study which has given us new insights into what could be happening to our lazy brains, says that this must have something to do with how the brain parts involved in making a decision connect with the brain part involved in how we assess reward and move our bodies to get the reward.

To do this, they tested 17 males aged between 19-38 to accomplish a task that would ask them to exert an effort to obtain a reward. Before they did the task, the researchers already identified the participants in terms of where they were in the standard “apathy” scale. Then when they gave the task, they monitored the brains of the participants in an MRI machine.

Naturally and predictably, those who registered as “lazier” exerted less effort in their behavior (in this experiment, it meant squeezing a ball) to obtain the reward. But what surprised the scientists was, based on the MRI scans, the brains of the lazier participants showed greater activity in the pre-motor area when they decided to act. They originally thought it would show the opposite. It seems that for lazy people, there is more effort required for that brain part to act. In other words, that brain part is not being efficient.  

Now, if you tell give your mom this reason as you try to refuse to do an errand, make sure your mom does not know that no one yet knows why the lazy brain requires more effort to begin with. I would also not be surprised if your mom would not hesitate to offer her own empirically grounded bases as to why you are lazy, including the genetic reasons which would probably involve your father’s side of the family.

The scientists even saw that the lazy brain also exerts more effort to connect with other brain areas that would finally result in an action such as those involved when you anticipate an action and acting itself. More effort exerted by the lazy brain to connect those brain parts mean that the connections as not as strong and robust.

I am intrigued by this study because I think very few people are lazy in everything. We are all lazy in some things and eager to act in others. The kick that builds those bridges between our brain parts that seals our everyday missions to act is probably not just reward.  Maybe the degrees of apathy we exhibit is nature’s way of making us refrain from acting on every single offer or promise of a reward because it will make for a life too frenzied for our good.

Some people also simply choose to be lazy for various reasons. My late husband called this “cultivated incompetence.” You just don’t act either because you want to give the chance to someone else to sign or you just are amused at what happens when you don’t act.  Either way, the science of laziness now seems to be rousing from sleep to tell us more about why we don’t act when we normally should. – Rappler.com