Kids like repetition of a certain kind. And people like monotonous activities and I guess "zoning out" too. However, I can tell you why we get bored easily whe

Kids like repetition of a certain kind. And people like monotonous activities and I guess "zoning out" too. However, I can tell you why we get bored easily when seeing repetition. It's that "we've grasped the pattern, it's very simple, and now we have more important things to do with our lives." Predicting the pattern isn't interesting anymore to anyone except maybe a kid for about 10 seconds. As humans, our curiosity drives us to seek out new things so we can explain our surroundings. Randomness drives us crazy because we can't predict what happens, and thus our ability to "prevent bad things" is hampered. Even worse than randomness is a smart opponent, e.g. in chess, who thwarts our schemes by intelligently choosing a move based on preventing the traps we could lay. We may feel powerless at that point. But even more annoying, to the point of ANGER (a reaction that we and other primates resort to), is when the opponent makes sub-obtimal moves because they can predict what we are going to do, or quickly reacts to what we are doing, and therefore don't even bother defending against things it is confident we won't do. This is worse than us being able to predict things, it's worse than randomness, it's worse than optimal strategy, it's literally them "toying with us" and "cheating by predicting our very moves"! The reason we feel anger and tend to escalate (e.g. quit the game, flip the board) at that point, is that we sense not only how much weaker we are but that the other side is "making fun of us", toying with us, we have no hope of "winning" but also we are in a dangerous situation since the toying can turn into something more. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oue3pcmh-U0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oue3pcmh-U0 Try it with other people and you'll see exactly this ladder...