14 DAY TRIAL // Mind-wandering is too common to ignore.
Admit that many times, instead of listening to boring classes you fantasized with a hot girl mate next to you or you imagined a crazy party... We all experience this, even if we struggle to avoid it.
A new array of researches tries to shed light on this less investigated domain of the psychology.
Maybe these results will help students keep their focus on textbooks and lectures, and drivers to keep their minds on the road, not to mention severe disorders like deficit hyperactivity disorder, an inability to focus that triggers trouble in multiple areas of life.
Michael Kane, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro made the next experiment: he sampled the thoughts of students at eight random times daily for a week. On average, they were wandering about 30 % of the time but some students even 80 - 90 % of the time. Only one out of 126 subjects denied any wandering.
The 30 - 40 % value was also found in everyday life. "If you want to understand people's mental lives, this is a phenomenon we ought to be thinking about," Kane said.
Most mind-wandering results harmless but sometimes the results can be tragic, like car accidents. Kane signaled the 2003 case of a college professor who drove to work in Irvine, California, one hot August day, parked and went to his office, loosing the track of the fact that his 10-month-old son was in the back seat. The boy died from the heat.
Reading is a task that requires concentration. "Even here, people's minds wander 15 to 20 % of the time. And they often don't realize it," said Jonathan Schooler of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
When they asked college students to read passages from books "the volunteers pushed a button every time they noticed their thoughts straying, and that happened regularly," Schooler said. When the subjects were interrupted at random times and asked what they were thinking about, "we regularly catch people's minds wandering before they've noticed it themselves," Schooler said. "And these stealth episodes appear to hamper reading comprehension," he said.
In Kane's research, subjects' wandering thoughts focused more on everyday things than on fantasies, and much more than on worries. He believes the mind has not only the goal of getting whatever task we're focused on, but also personal goals outside of our close awareness, like making plans for the future, working out everyday problems, and better personal understanding.
A team of Harvard's Massachusetts General Hospital has found that mind-wandering uses the same circuitry that the brain employs when people are told to do nothing (idle stage).
Schooler plans to check whether meditation training might help on wandering thought phenomenon. "Why is the brain wired to wander? What could possibly be good about that?" said Schooler. "Mind-wandering is probably more often helpful than harmful. For one thing, the cost is low: despite notable exceptions, life usually doesn't demand our full attention. A lot of human daily life is autopilot," said Kaine.
"There's a whole lot of what we need to do that we can do without thinking about it, from driving to eating .... We do occasionally miss that turn on the way home, but we get through the day pretty well."
Devoting some idle brain capacity to planning and solving problems "seems like a pretty good use of time," he said.
Schooler supposes mind-wandering promotes creativity. "It's unconstrained, it can go anywhere, which is sort of the perfect situation for creative thought," he said. "Maybe the mind wanders simply because it can. I can be stuck in my car in traffic and not go absolutely crazy because I'm not stuck in the here and now. I can think about what happened last night. And that's great." said Malia Mason of Massachusetts General Hospital.