Colin Chapman, the founder of Lotus Cars, was one of motor racing's most influential engineers. He summed up his philosophy as "simplify, then add lightness". A simple, featherweight car might be slower on the straights than a beefy muscle-machine, he reasoned. But it would be faster everywhere else. Between 1962 and 1978 Lotus won seven Formula One constructors championships.

It appears to be an uncommon insight since humans always struggle with subtractive thinking. When asked to improve something, they tend to suggest adding new things rather than removing some, even when additions lead to not satisfying results. In one study conducted by Gabrielle Adams, along with colleagues at the University of Virginia, participants were asked to change a pattern on a grid(网格)of coloured squares to make it balanced. Although that could be done equally well by adding new squares or by deleting existing ones,78% chose the additive option.

But why people forget that less is often more? One experiment asked participants to redesign an unbalanced Lego structure so that it could support a house-brick. Participants could earn a dollar for fixing the problem, but each piece of Lego they added cut that reward by ten cents. Even then, only 41% worked out that simplifying the structure by removing a single block,rather than complicating it by adding more, was the way to maximise the payout. Practice improved people's chances of spotting subtractive solutions, suggesting that many were simply not thinking of the possibility, at least at first.

What all this amounts to is evidence for " additive thinking" entering the list of" cognitive biases"(认知偏差).The 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded for demonstrating that humans are not thinking logically as economists do. Instead of thinking a problem through and coming up with an ideal solution, they tend to use cognitive shortcuts that are fast and—mostly—"good enough".

“I’m dying of boredom!”complained Yelena, who performed in Chekhov’s 1897 play UncleVanya. “I don’t know what to do!” Of course, if Yelena were around today, she’d pull out her smartphone to find something amusing, like Tik Tok. It’s easy to kill the time. However, is boredom entirely good for nothing? What if it is a meaningful experience—one that leads us to states of deeper thoughtfulness or creativity?

That’s the conclusion of two fascinating recent studies. In one, researchers asked a group of subjects to do something boring, like copying out numbers from a phone book, and then take tests of creative thinking, such as designing uses for a pair of cups. As a result, bored subjects came up with more ideas than a non-bored control group, and their ideas were often more creative. In the second study, subjects who took an “associative thought” word test came up with more answers when they’d been required to watch a dull screensaver (屏保).

Boredom might bring creativity because a restless mind hungers for stimulation. “Boredom becomes a seeking state. What you’re doing now is not satisfying. So you’re seeking and get engaged.” says Sandi Mann, a psychologist at the University of Central Lancashire. Kierkegaard, a philosopher, described jokingly, “The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings.” However, what worries Mann is that these days we don’t enjoy these slow moments. Instead, we resist them. “We try to beat every moment of boredom in our lives with mobile devices,” says Mann, who claims she often gets some of her best thinking done when she’s on the bus. “The smartphone might relieve us temporarily, but it shuts down the deeper thinking that can come from staring down the boredom. Noodling on your phone is like eating junk food.” she says.

So here’s an idea: instead of always fleeing boredom, lean into it. Sometimes, shutting down your Internet connection for a while will enforce a higher level of productivity.

One morning a few years ago, at home in the Mänoa Valley on Oahu, scientist Kimberly Carlson looked out of the window and saw a rainbow so bright and clear that it took her breath away. That wasn’t a shocker: Hawaii is possibly the best place in the world to see rainbows today, and Manoa has particularly ideal conditions for clear bows: frequent rain showers and sunlight. But Carlson, now an environmental science professor now at New York University, realized she didn’t know the answer to a simple question: Would climate change affect Hawaii’s and the whole planet’s breathtaking rainbows? She shared the question with some climate scientist colleagues, and it interested them so much that they enlisted a class full of students to investigate.

Rainbows are not special because their basic ingredients are common and governed by relatively straightforward physics. “The basic recipe for seeing any part of the natural rainbow,” says Lee, “is sunlit rain.”

In November, they published their findings. “Climate change is affecting rainbows—now we know that’s true,” says Carlson, the lead author on the paper, which used computer models to simulate future rainbow-ready conditions. As major weather patterns change because of climate change, many parts of the world-particularly places nearer to the poles, like Alaska or Siberia, will get more rain—potentially adding dozens more rainbow-rich days by the end of the century.

The changes follow broader patterns of climate change; in fact, the shifts highlight some of the biggest risks and dangers. The increases in the Arctic, for example, are likely to play out because water that used to fall from the sky as snow will more often drop down as rain in a hotter future. And today’s rainbow-rich Amazon is predicted to suffer more frequently drought—both because the forest, which currently creates it sown rain, will lose that superpower as it shrinks, and because planet-wide climate change is shifting and changing the major weather patterns that cause tropical rainfall.