The philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 1600s that all of humanity's problems stem from the inability to sit quietly in a room alone, and three centuries of psychology research has done little to contradict him

The line turns up in productivity books, meditation apps, digital detox essays and roughly every third talk about attention. It is a good line. It is also not quite what Pascal wrote, and the study most often produced as its modern confirmation does not mention him at all.

Both of those things are worth knowing, because the gap between the quotation and the evidence is where most of the interesting material sits.

What Pascal actually wrote

The sentence comes from the Pensées, the unfinished defence of Christianity Pascal was assembling when he died in 1662, published posthumously in 1670. It sits in the section on divertissement, usually translated as diversion or distraction. In the standard numbering it is fragment 139 in the Brunschvicg edition, 136 in Lafuma and 168 in Sellier. The numbering is worth stating carefully, because Lafuma 139 is a different fragment.

The French runs: j’ai dit souvent que tout le malheur des hommes vient d’une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos dans une chambre. Read closely, that is: I have often said that all the misery of men comes from a single thing, which is not knowing how to stay at rest in a room.

One word in the popular English version has no counterpart in the French at all. Pascal does not say alone. There is no seul in the sentence, and nothing standing in for it.

Quietly is a softer case. It is a translator’s rendering of en repos, which covers rest, repose and stillness, and W. F. Trotter’s standard English version uses exactly that word. Stay at rest in a room is an alternative reading rather than a correction. But the sentence Pascal wrote is about not being able to stay put, and the lines immediately following it are about men buying army commissions and going to sea rather than sit still at home. That is a claim about restlessness. Solitude does enter the fragment later, when Pascal turns to why prison is such a torment, but it is not what this sentence is about.

The other drift is malheur, which is misery or unhappiness, rendered in the popular version as problems. Misery is an inward condition. Problems are things that happen. Pascal was making the first claim and gets quoted as making the second.

There is a third thing, and it is the one that would have bothered him most. The famous sentence is not his conclusion. It is his opening observation, and he goes underneath it in the very next paragraph: having found the cause of our unhappiness he wanted its reason, and located that in le malheur naturel de notre condition faible et mortelle, the natural wretchedness of our weak and mortal condition. Restlessness is the symptom in his account. Mortality is the disease. The line that gets quoted is the part he then argued past.

The study that gets cited as the confirmation

The modern half of the claim rests very heavily on one paper: Just think: The challenges of the disengaged mind, by Timothy Wilson, David Reinhard, Erin Westgate, Daniel Gilbert and colleagues, published in Science in July 2014.

Across 11 studies, participants spent somewhere between 6 and 15 minutes with nothing to do but think. In the laboratory versions they sat in an unadorned room having handed over their phones and anything to write with. Two of the studies were completed at home instead, and a substantial share of those participants admitted afterwards to breaking the rules and finding a distraction. People mostly did not enjoy the thinking period, and they enjoyed mundane external activities considerably more.

The finding that made the paper famous is study 10. Participants had already received a mild electric shock and been asked whether they would pay money to avoid receiving it again. Then they were left alone to think, with the shock button available.

According to the paper, 67 per cent of men gave themselves at least one shock during the thinking period, against 25 per cent of women. People who had said they would pay to avoid a shock chose to take one rather than sit there.

What that figure rests on

It is a genuinely arresting result, and it is smaller than its reputation.

The 67 per cent is 12 men out of 18. The 25 per cent is 6 women out of 24. Those 42 people are the subset of 55 undergraduates who had said they would pay to avoid the shock, which is a defensible screening decision and does narrow the base considerably. Including all 55, the figures are 71 per cent of men and 26 per cent of women. Applying a stricter screen leaves 27 people, and 64 per cent of men and 15 per cent of women.

The men and women were not receiving the same shock. The authors set it at 4 milliamperes initially, found in pilot testing that women rated it more painful, and reduced the level for women to 2.3 milliamperes. They did this deliberately, to equalise how unpleasant the shock felt rather than how strong it was, and they report that it worked: there was no significant difference between men and women in how pleasant they rated it. That is a defensible choice, and it does mean the gender comparison is between matched subjective experiences rather than matched stimuli, which are not the same thing.

There was also one man who shocked himself 190 times. He is excluded from the reported range and mean, as he should be, and he is still counted among the 12 of 18.

The authors themselves note that this was the only study of the eleven in which they found a gender difference in enjoyment of the thinking period, and they attribute the shock difference to sensation-seeking in a single hedged sentence. Nearly all the participants across the paper were undergraduates. The one community sample, recruited at a farmer’s market and a church, reported enjoying the thinking period more than the students did, and the authors flag possible self-selection, noting that fewer than half of community members who heard about the study went on to complete it, and that more than half of those who did admitted to seeking distractions anyway.

What the authors concluded, and who they quoted

Their actual conclusion is narrower than the Pascal framing suggests. It is that most people prefer doing something to doing nothing, even when the something is unpleasant. The closing line of the paper is that the untutored mind does not like to be alone with itself, and they are explicit that people are sometimes absorbed by interesting ideas and pleasant daydreams, and that thinking can be trained.

Pascal appears nowhere in the paper. The epigraph is Milton.

Nor did the finding go unchallenged. A commentary in Frontiers in Psychology asked directly whether thinking is really aversive, and the question of how much of the effect is about solitude, how much about boredom, and how much about being an undergraduate in a bare room for a quarter of an hour has not been closed.

Where that leaves the claim

Something real is being described by both men, and it is not the same something.

Wilson and colleagues showed that unstructured time with nothing to do is unpleasant enough that a proportion of people will take a small electric shock to interrupt it. That is a finding about tolerance for an empty fifteen minutes. Pascal was making a much larger claim about why human beings build careers, start wars and go to sea, and no experiment of this kind can reach it.

In our reading, what psychology has produced is a body of work showing that people find brief unstructured time with their own thoughts less pleasant than doing almost anything else, one unusually memorable demonstration of it, and a live argument about what the demonstration means. What it has not produced, and could not, is a test of the causal claim in the quotation. Whether restlessness is the root of human misery is not the sort of proposition an experiment can reach.

What we find useful about the passage is the part nobody quotes. Pascal thought the restlessness was worth explaining rather than worth condemning, and the explanation he reached for was not weakness of character.