How often does your mind wander?

Some of the most striking evidence comes from Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara who is one of the leading researchers on mind wandering. In 2005 he and his colleagues told a group of undergraduates to read the opening chapters of War and Peace on a computer monitor and then to tap a key whenever they realized they were not thinking about what they were reading. On average, the students reported that their minds wandered 5.4 times in a 45-minute session. Other researchers have gotten similar results with simpler tasks, such as pronouncing words or pressing a button in response to seeing particular letters and numbers. Depending on the experiment, people spend up to half their time not thinking about the task at hand—even when they’ve been told explicitly to pay attention.

When I was a kid I thought there was something wrong with me because I would “read” pages at a time without paying attention to what I was reading.  My eyes would crawl over the words and move from line to line and in a certain real sense I was reading but my conscious mind was completely uninvolved.  After a few pages I would notice that I had absorbed nothing.

I still have a wandering mind but over time I have come to view it as a net asset.  The key is learning to teach your wandering mind to leave breadcrumbs.  Because it knows how to get to places that your conscious mind doesn’t.

Because a fair amount of mind wandering happens without our ever noticing, the solutions it lets us reach may come as a surprise. There are many stories in the history of science of great discoveries occurring to people out of the blue. The French mathematician Henri Poincaré once wrote about how he struggled for two weeks with a difficult mathematical proof. He set it aside to take a bus to a geology conference, and the moment he stepped on the bus, the solution came to him. It is possible that mind wandering led him to the solution. John Kounios of Drexel University and his colleagues have done brain scans that capture the moment when people have a sudden insight that lets them solve a word puzzle. Many of the regions that become active during those creative flashes belong to the default network and the executive control system as well.

The article is worth a read. (akubura ack:  Mindhacks)