Mind Wandering, or Getting your Einstein On


Does your mind tend to wander? Most people believe that their minds wander about 10% of the time. Researchers at UC Santa Barbara put that figure at more like 30%.  When engaged in well-rehearsed tasks like driving a car on a wide-open highway, it’s estimated that mind wandering can be as high as 70%.

In her book How to Get People to Do Stuff, behavioral psychologist Susan Weinschenk makes the important distinction between mind wandering and daydreaming.

According to Weinschenk, daydreaming involves an aspect of fantasy, like imagining you’ve been asked to star in the next Hunger Games flick opposite Jennifer Lawrence, or you’ve just won the lottery.

Mind wandering occurs when your subconscious brain is engaged in a habituated activity, like driving, and at the same time you’re thinking about some other task or wrestling with some other problem.

Doing one thing while your brain focuses on something else might sound an awful lot like multi-tasking. However, the key to multitasking is performing multiple simultaneous conscious activities. In fact, scientists haven’t definitively proven true multitasking even exists. Humans seem to lack the cognitive firepower to pull off multiple independent-thinking operations at the same time.

What feels like multitasking is actually the brain flipping back and forth between separate mental processes, but because of the speed of the flipping, you have the illusion of synchronicity. Psychologists call this “task switching.” It helps to explain a common downside to this behavior, what’s sometimes called the 50/50 rule: when you try to do two things at once, both tasks tend to take 50% longer and involve 50% more mistakes.

So mind wandering is not multitasking or daydreaming. Mind wandering, according to researchers at UC Santa Barbara, is tied to creativity.  Weinschenk notes that the ability to perform a rote task while mind wandering and, more specifically, to switch on this mental meandering at will is “the hallmark of the most creative people.”

There are numerous stories of great thinkers like Nicola Tesla and Albert Einstein’s daydreaming or “thought experiments” helping to fuel some of the greatest achievements of modern time. Weinschenk would probably be quick to point out that these geniuses were not mere daydreamers, but accomplished mind wanderers.

I suppose that’s a blow to all of us daydreamers who up until now could take solace in our former moony-eyed patron saints, Tesla and Einstein. I, for one, vow to pay more attention to my own mind wandering in the future.

Anyway, I’ll get right on that after I finish winning the lottery…

Check out Robb’s new book and more 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Robert Frost Quandary, or How Irrational Thinking Might Save Your Life

Image
You stumble out of the wilderness, having had no contact with humans for at least ten days. You’re weak from hunger and fatigue and you find yourself at a crossroads, power lines stretching out along each of the separate roadways. It’s decision time. You think about Robert Frost’s poem, and wonder if his advice to take the road less traveled might not just lead to your demise. What do you do, or more importantly, which brain system should you use to make this crucial decision? Daniel Kahneman, famed psychologist, winner of the Nobel prize for prospect theory and author of Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow might be the one guy to call, assuming your existential crossroads gets cellphone reception. Kahneman explains that we have two systems for making decisions. He refers to them simply as System 1 and System 2. System 1 is reflexive, automatic, and impulsive. It takes a constant reading of your surroundings and generates short-term predictions, all operating on a level beneath yo
Read more

Who Are You: Does Personality Change as We Age?

Image
Are you the same “you” that you were twenty years ago? Thirty? Forty? What about fifty years ago? While science still struggles to quantify, measure, and categorize personality, some have a different question: how stable is personality in the first place? Do the high school version of yourself and the retiree version of yourself still have some common immutable core? It depends how you look at it , says a paper by lead author Rodica Damian of University of Houston and her co-authors Marion Spengler of the University of Tuebingen in Germany, Brent W. Roberts of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and UH grad student Andreea Sutu. The paper in question goes by the catchy title “Sixteen going on sixty-six: A longitudinal study of personality stability and change across 50 years.” Damian and her colleagues compared the results for 1,795 U.S. adults who had taken a personality test as teenagers and then again, five decades years later. The team found that yes, there is a
Read more

The Best Painkiller Isn't What You Think It Is

Image
When we say that listening to the right song makes us feel better, usually we mean it in terms of emotions. However, a new study from the University of Utah Health suggests that combining certain painkillers with certain music boosts the pain-fighting effect of the medication a measurable amount. This recent bit of research was conducted specifically on models recreating two types of pain: inflammatory and post-surgical. (Nerve pain, or neuropathic pain, was not addressed.) Low doses of four medications were explored: ibuprofen, cannabidiol, levetiracetam, and NAX 5055. As for music, the researchers went with one artist only, while the control groups were given one of the four drugs and subjected to white noise. What music would you choose for optimal painkilling effect? The experimenters went with Mozart. (Interestingly, the phrase “Mozart therapy” already exists, referring to the beneficial effect ol’ Amadeus can have on patients with epilepsy. For instance, a 2018 st
Read more