CULTURE

Take it easy!
Rest and relaxation is a deeply serious business, finds Mary Halton

WE ARE all only

a night or two
of decent sleep
away from being
successful
members of
society, right?
If we could just
sneak a magical extra hour of
shut-eye, wouldnt the world be
a better place? Such thoughts
sustain many of us through hectic
working days; the carrot getting
us to the weekend is the chance
for more rest.
However, while sleep is the
most obvious way we rest, neither
naps nor nocturnal unconscious
sojourns made it into the top 10
most popular activities revealed
by the Rest Test, a survey of over
18,000 people in 134 countries.
The results were compiled by the
multidisciplinary team Hubbub,
funded by the Wellcome Trust.
As it turns out, from reading to
daydreaming, rest is something
we understand as a necessarily
conscious experience, a deliberate
disengagement from the rhythms
of lifes obligations. But for Alex
Pang, rest looks quite different.
In Rest, his paean to a balanced
life, he argues that work and rest
are not opposing forces, but an
essential, reciprocal partnership.
With an emphasis on rests
benefits for the creative mind,
Pang proposes that it has a place
in our lives as a learned skill one
to hone and tend just as we would
practise a musical instrument or
train for a race. Citing everyone
Our brain is nearly as energetic at
rest as it is when we are busy
54 | NewScientist | 19 November 2016

from Charles Darwin to Steve Jobs, Mountain View campus, but

he suggests our approach should
quite another thing on Londons
be as structured as for other tasks. noisy, crowded, polluted streets
He highlights the importance of
on a rainy November day.
a daily routine and of deliberately
Although many of us accept
stopping at an allotted time, even the idea that we work effectively
if we are at our productive peak.
for only 4 hours a day, sadly the
Although he overlooks the wide creative experiences of writers,
acknowledgement that we enjoy
artists and Victorian naturalists
more leisure than our historical
Pang sees rest as a learned
counterparts, it is useful to
skill one to hone and tend
explore the cultural implications
as we would practise a
of the competitive busyness
musical instrument
that pervades modern working
life. Pangs examples from the
past are largely male because
are unlikely to cause the downfall
rest, creative or otherwise, has
of the 9-to-5-plus-checking-yourpresumably been alien to many
emails-out-of-hours.
women throughout history.
But there is a slower side to rest
Yet there is a very Silicon Valley too, as evidenced by artworks
flavour to his approach. Walking
inspired by the Rest Test that were
meetings are all very well and
recently on show at an exhibition,
good in Googles aptly named
Rest and its Discontents, curated

FERDINANDO SCIANNA / MAGNUM PHOTOS

Rest: Why you get more done when

you work less by Alex Soojung-Kim
Pang, Basic Books, $27.50

by Robert Devcic, founder of GV

Art London. To judge by them, our
definition of rest is amorphous.
For some, it is the opposite of
work, for others, the antithesis of
noise. And it appears to be more
easily signified by the absence
rather than presence of certain
qualities: so, mapped out across
a peaceful Mile End Art Pavilion
in Londons East End, were
fragmented responses to the
idea of restlessness by artists,
researchers and activists from
the Hubbub collective.
While it didnt provide much
satisfaction for fans of hard data,
there was a dreamlike quality to
some of the film installations,
which explored descriptive
experience sampling a method
used to document peoples
thoughts when their minds
wander distilled into aural
and visual vignettes.
Closing in on what the brain
is up to during rest also features
in one of Rests most interesting
revelations: the default mode
network. These interconnected
regions of the brain switch on
when we stop focusing on
external tasks. Although this
network has only been researched
since the 1990s, studies indicate
that it may have a vast influence
on our lives, since it is implicated
in everything from empathy to
memory to cognitive impairment.
This resting state is barely
less energetic than the engaged
brain. So while we may have a
sardonic approach to deliberate
rest and power naps, next time
youre caught staring into space,
remember youre busy exercising
this vital neural network.
Mary Halton is a writer based in
London