This new Wellcome Collection project on rest and busyness looks really interesting:

The urge to be busy defines modern life. Rest can seem hard to find, whether in relation to an exhausted body, a racing mind or a hectic city. Should we slow down, or should we embrace intense activity? What effects do each of these states have on the health of our bodies and minds? Such questions frequently find their way into media reports and everyday conversations, but there has never been any sustained interdisciplinary attempt to answer them. The Hub will gather international experts investigating hubbub and rest at different scales, to breathe new life into the questions we ask about rest and busyness.

Felicity Callard who’s going to direct the project, had a piece in The Guardian that gave a good overview of the recent neuroscientific work on rest. After noting the discovery that all kinds of things are going on in the brain’s “resting state,”  and that a new crop of studies are revealing the psychological positives of daydreaming, she explains,

there remain at least two big challenges if we are to understand the complex neurological and psychic attributes of mental states of “rest”. First, to understand the relationship between brain dynamics and corresponding inner experience – a scientific effort that is nothing less than an attempt to characterise the fugitive movements and mechanisms of thought. Second, to really figure out what the relationship is between the state of rest that characterises the strange, constricted experience of being inside an MRI scanner, and people’s everyday, varied and unequal experiences of mental and bodily rest. To make progress on either of these questions, we need far richer descriptions and models of what actually goes on in minds – and, of course, bodies – during states of rest than we have now.

Are the new “busier” models of mental rest that are being advanced in neuroscience and psychology drawing from changing experiences of “rest” in people’s everyday lives? Current models of the resting mind need to incorporate insights from people’s multifaceted experiences of rest, which undoubtedly extend well beyond currently favoured practices for “stilling the mind” such as meditation.

It’s worth recalling that rest is commonly defined by what it isn’t. In a dictionary, for example, you’ll find it defined as the absence of activity, labour, exertion, disturbance and movement. That minds “at rest” are now, at least in certain quarters, characterised precisely by their activity, labour, exertion and movement, poses for us all important scientific and social questions about this commonly hidden but vital aspect of our lives.

It’s not really clear to me what The Hub is, other than yet another converted lofty-Ikea-filled team collaboration buzzspace, but hey, those aren’t bad, and you can always escape them when you need solitude.

Still, you can’t fault the idea of a project on rest and busyness.