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A Wandering Mind Isn't Just A Distraction. It May Be Your Brain's Default State.

Senior Writer, The Huffington Post

Even if you don’t consider yourself a daydreamer, you probably spend a lot of time in a state of mental wandering ― it’s natural for your mind to drift away from the present moment when you’re in the shower, walking to work or doing the dishes.

In recent years, scientists have been paying a lot more attention to mind-wandering, an activity that takes up as much as 50 percent of our waking hours . Psychologists previously tended to view mind-wandering as largely useless, but an emerging body of research suggests that it is a natural and healthy part of our mental lives.

Researchers from the University of British Columbia and the University of California, Berkeley conducted a review of over 200 studies to highlight the relationship between mind-wandering ― often defined in psychological literature as “task-unrelated thought,” or TUT ― and the thinking processes involved in creativity and some mental illnesses, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, anxiety and depression.

“Sometimes the mind moves freely from one idea to another, but at other times it keeps coming back to the same idea, drawn by some worry or emotion,” Dr. Kalina Christoff, lead study author and principal investigator of the Cognitive Neuroscience of Thought Laboratory at UBC, said in a statement.

“Understanding what makes thought free and what makes it constrained is crucial because it can help us understand how thoughts move in the minds of those diagnosed with mental illness,” she said.

The Role Of A Wandering Mind

Traditionally, mind-wandering has been defined as thinking that arises spontaneously, without relating to any sort of task or external input. But this definition is only a starting point: Without external focus, the researchers explain, the mind moves from one thought to another ― jumping between memories, imaginings, plans and goals.

This default “spontaneous mode” can be hemmed in in two ways: A person can deliberately turn their attention to a task, or, in the case of someone with a mental health issue, focus can happen because thoughts have gotten stuck on a persistent worry or pulled away by an environmental distraction.

On a neurological level, the brain’s default mode network ― a broad network that engages many different cognitive processes and regions on the internal surface of the brain ― activates when our minds wander. In contrast, when we focus our attention on a goal, plan or environmental stimulus, the part of the brain devoted to external attention is more active.

Specifically, the researchers pinpointed the memory and imaginative centers within the default mode network as being largely responsible for the variety of our spontaneous thoughts.

“You’re jumping around from one thing to another,” Zachary Irving, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Berkeley and study co-author who has ADHD, told The Huffington Post. “We think that’s the default state of these memory and imaginative structures.”

A Creative Mind Is A Wandering Mind

Creative thinking can be an extension of ordinary mind-wandering, the researchers explained, and a growing body of research has linked daydreaming with creativity . In highly creative people, psychologists have observed a tendency toward a variation on mind-wandering known as “ positive-constructive daydreaming ,” in which has also been associated with self-awareness, goal-oriented thinking and increased compassion.

The free play of thoughts that occurs in mind-wandering may enable us to think more flexibly and draw more liberally upon our vast internal reservoir of memories, feelings and images in order to create new and unusual connections.

“Mind-wandering in the sense of the mind moving freely from one idea to another has huge benefits in terms of arriving at new ideas,” Christoff said. “It’s by virtue of free movement that we generate new ideas, and that’s where creativity lies.”

What Mind-Wandering Can Tell Us About Mental Illness

This type of mental activity can provide an important window into the thinking patterns that underly psychological disorders involving alterations in spontaneous thought.

The mind of someone with ADHD, for example, wanders more widely and frequently than that of an average individual. In someone with anxiety and depression, the mind has an unusually strong tendency to get stuck on a particular worry or negative thought.

“Disorders like ADHD and anxiety and depression aren’t totally disconnected from what normally goes on in the mind,” Irving said. “There’s this ordinary ebb and flow of thoughts, where you’re moving from mind-wandering to sticky thoughts to goal-directed thoughts. ... We think of these disorders as exaggerated versions of those sorts of ordinary thoughts.”

So despite what your elementary school teachers may have told you, it’s perfectly fine to let your thoughts wander every once in a while. But if you find your mind wandering too much or getting stuck on negative thoughts, it may be time to seek help.

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Why Mind Wandering Can Be So Miserable, According to Happiness Experts

We still don’t know why our minds seem so determined to exit the present moment, but researchers have a few ideas

Libby Copeland

For you, it could be the drive home on the freeway in stop-and-go traffic, a run without headphones or the time it takes to brush your teeth. It’s the place where you’re completely alone with your thoughts—and it’s terrifying. For me, it’s the shower.

The shower is where I’m barraged with all the “what-ifs,” the imagined catastrophes, the endless to-do list. To avoid them, I’ve tried everything from shower radio and podcasts to taking a bath so I can watch an iPad. I’ve always thought this shower-dread was just my own neurosis. But psychological research is shedding insight into why our minds tend to wander without our consent—and why it can be so unpleasant.

Scientists, being scientists, sometimes refer to the experience of mind-wandering as “stimulus-independent thought.” But by any name, you know it: It’s the experience of arriving at work with no memory of the commute. When you’re engaged in mundane activities that require little attention, your brain drifts off like a balloon escaping a child’s hand—traveling to the future, ruminating on the past, generating to-do lists, regrets and daydreams. 

In the last 15 years, the science of mind wandering has mushroomed as a topic of scholarly study, thanks in part to advances in brain imaging. But for a long time, it was still difficult to see what people’s brains were doing outside the lab. Then, when smartphones came on the scene in the late 2000s, researchers came up with an ingenious approach to understanding just how often the human brain wanders in the wilds of modern life.

As it turns out, our brains are wily, wild things, and what they do when we’re not paying attention has major implications for our happiness. 

In 2010, Matt Killingsworth, then a doctoral student in the lab of happiness researcher Daniel Gilbert at Harvard University, designed an iPhone app that pinged people throughout the day, asking what they were experiencing at that very moment. The app asked questions like these, as paraphrased by Killingsworth:

1. How do you feel, on a scale ranging from very bad to very good?

2. What are you doing (on a list of 22 different activities, including things like eating, working and watching TV)?

3. Are you thinking about something other than what you're currently doing?

Killingsworth and Gilbert tested their app on a few thousand subjects to find that people’s minds tended to wander 47 percent of the time. Looking at 22 common daily activities including working, shopping and exercising, they found that people’s minds wandered the least during sex (10 percent of the time) and the most during grooming activities (65 percent of the time)—including taking a shower. In fact, the shower appears to be especially prone to mind wandering because it requires relatively little thought compared to something like cooking.

Equally intriguing to researchers was the effect of all that mind wandering on people’s moods: Overall, people were less happy when their minds wandered. Neutral and negative thoughts seemed to make them less happy than being in the moment, and pleasant thoughts made them no happier. Even when people were engaged in an activity they said they didn’t like—commuting, for example—they were happier when focused on the commute than when their minds strayed.

What’s more, people’s negative moods appeared to be the result, rather than the cause, of the mind wandering. Recently, I asked Killingsworth why he thought mind wandering made people unhappy. “When our mind wanders, I think it really blunts the enjoyment of what it is that were doing,” he told me.

For most, the shower in and of itself is not an unpleasant experience. But any pleasure we might derive from the tactile experience of the hot water is muted, because our minds are elsewhere. Even when our thoughts meander to pleasant things, like an upcoming vacation, Killingsworth says the imagined pleasure is far less vivid and enjoyable than the real thing.

Plus, in daily life we rarely encounter situations so bad that we really need the mental escape that mind wandering provides. More often, we’re daydreaming away the quotidian details that make up a life. “I’ve failed to find any objective circumstances so bad that when people are in their heads they’re actually feeling better,” Killingsworth told me. “In every case they’re actually surprisingly happier being in that moment , on average.”

When I told Killingsworth I spend my time in the shower imagining catastrophes, he wasn't surprised. More than a quarter of our mental meanderings are to unpleasant topics, he’s found. And the vast majority of our musings are focused on the future, rather than the past. For our ancestors, that ability to imagine and plan for upcoming dangers must have been adaptive, he says. Today, it might help us plan for looming deadlines and sources of workplace conflict.

But taken to an extreme in modern day life, it can be a hell of an impediment. “The reality is, most of the things we’re worrying about are not so dangerous,” he said.

In some cases, mind wandering does serve a purpose. Our minds might “scan the internal or external environment for things coming up we may have to deal with,” says Claire Zedelius , a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California at Santa Barbara who works in the lab of mind wandering expert Jonathan Schooler . Mind wandering may also be linked to certain kinds of creativity , and in particular to a creativity “incubation period” during which our minds are busy coming up with ideas, Schooler’s lab has found. 

It’s unclear how our tendency to drift is affected by the diversions and distractions of our smartphones. As Killingsworth pointed out, all those distractions—podcasts, email, texts and even happiness trackers—may mean we’re effectively mind wandering less. But it may also be that “our capacity to direct our attention for sustained periods gets diminished, so that then when we’re in a situation that’s not completely engaging, maybe we have a greater propensity to start mind wandering.”

I took up mindfulness meditation a few years ago, a practice which has made me much more aware of how I’m complicit in my own distress. For about 15 minutes most days, I sit in a chair and focus on the feeling of my breath, directing myself back to the physical sensation when my mind flits away. This has helped me notice how where I go when I mind wander—away from the moment, toward imagined future catastrophes that can’t be solved.

Cortland Dahl , who studies the neuroscience of mind wandering and has been meditating for 25 years, told me that he was six months into daily meditation practice when he witnessed a change in the way he related to the present moment. “I noticed I just started to enjoy things I didn’t enjoy before,” like standing in line, or sitting in traffic, he says. “My own mind became interesting, and I had something to do—‘Okay, back to the breath.’” Killingsworth’s findings help explain this, said Dahl, a research scientist at University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Healthy Minds.

“We tend to think of suffering as being due to a circumstance or a thing that’s happening—like, we’re physically in pain,” he says. “And I think what this research points to is that oftentimes, it’s not actually due to that circumstance but much more to the way we relate to that.”

Killingsworth is still gathering data through Trackyourhappiness.org , which now has data from more than 100,000 people, and he plans to publish more papers based on his findings. He says the lesson he’s taken from his research so far is that we human beings spend lots of time and effort fixing the wrong problem. “A lot of us spend a lot of time trying to optimize the objective reality of our lives,” he told me. “But we don’t spend a lot of time and effort trying to optimize where our minds go.”

A few months ago, I decided to try mindful showering. If I could observe the mental script and divert myself back to breath during meditation, I figured, perhaps I could divert myself back to the present moment while washing my hair. Each time I do it, there’s a brief moment of dread when I step into the shower without a podcast playing. Then, I start to pay attention. I try to notice one thing each time, whether it’s the goose bumps that rise when the hot water first hits, or the false urgency of the thoughts that still come. They demand I follow them, but they’re almost always riddles that can’t be solved.

The trick is in recognizing the illusion— ah yes, there’s that ridiculous clown car of anxiety coming down the road again. The saving grace, when I can manage to focus, is the present moment. 

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Article Contents

Introduction, mind wandering, cognitive control, why the mind wanders, explanations, predictions, philosophical implications, acknowledgments.

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Why does the mind wander?

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Joshua Shepherd, Why does the mind wander?, Neuroscience of Consciousness , Volume 2019, Issue 1, 2019, niz014, https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/niz014

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I seek an explanation for the etiology and the function of mind wandering episodes. My proposal—which I call the cognitive control proposal—is that mind wandering is a form of non-conscious guidance due to cognitive control. When the agent’s current goal is deemed insufficiently rewarding, the cognitive control system initiates a search for a new, more rewarding goal. This search is the process of unintentional mind wandering. After developing the proposal, and relating it to the literature on mind wandering and on cognitive control, I discuss explanations the proposal affords, testable predictions the proposal makes, and philosophical implications the proposal has.

Makes a novel and empirically tractable proposal regarding why the mind wanders

Offers novel explanations of data on mind wandering

Offers predictions for future work on mind wandering

Integrates literature on cognitive control with the literature on mind wandering

Discusses implications for a philosophical account of the nature of mind wandering

Minds wander

Some wander more than others, but human ones wander a lot. A much-cited estimate, due to Killingsworth and Gilbert (2010) , has it that the awake human mind spends from a third to half its time wandering. That’s a big range, a rough estimate, and there are good reasons to be suspicious of it (see Seli et al. 2018 ). The actual number will likely depend a bit upon the nature of mind wandering, a bit upon whether we have the right measure to produce such an estimate, and of course a bit on individual variability. Estimates aside, though, introspection reports that the mind wanders surprisingly often. My question here is this.

Why does it happen?

Sub-questions include the following. What drives the mind to wander? Does anything drive it to wander? Is the transition from focused thought to meandering thought random? Is it a failure of control, or is there some dark purpose behind these mental movements?

In the next section, I set the table by discussing a few interesting features of mind wandering, as well as a few recent proposals about its etiology, and its function. It is easy to conflate these two, since if mind wandering has a function its etiology may very well help illuminate it, but the questions are distinct. Here, I am more interested in why mind wandering happens—about its etiology. It turns out, though, that on my proposal mind wandering happens for good functional reasons. I develop this proposal, which I call the cognitive control proposal, in Cognitive control and Why the mind wanders sections. In Explanations section, I discuss some explanations this proposal makes possible. In Predictions section, I discuss some predictions that could confirm or disconfirm the proposal. In Philosophical implications section, I discuss implications for a philosophical account of the nature of mind wandering.

By referring to this phenomenon as mind wandering, a term familiar to the lay person, we hope to elevate the status of this research into mainstream psychological thinking (946).

As Murray et al. (2019) report, since that review, usage of “mind wandering” has risen dramatically. Only the Smallwood and Schooler paper used the term in a title or abstract in 2006. In 2018, the term appeared in 132 titles or abstracts.

Increased attention to the range of phenomena grouped together by “mind wandering” is salutary. But theorists recognize that the range of processes the term groups may contain multiple etiologies and processing signatures. Accordingly, theorists have proposed many sub-types of mind wandering, categorizing episodes of mind wandering in at least three distinct ways.

The first two involve a conception of mind wandering as defined in part by the contents of a mind-wandering episode, where the contents are unrelated to a task an agent was performing, or was supposed to perform. But there are various ways for an agent to engage in task-unrelated thought. Some categorize mind-wandering episodes in terms of a relationship to an agent’s intention: mind wandering might occur intentionally or unintentionally ( Giambra 1995 ; Seli et al. 2016 ). A second way to categorize mind-wandering episodes is in terms of a relationship to external stimuli. One might here distinguish between distraction, when the mind is prompted to wander by external stimuli, and mind wandering, when the mind is prompted to wander by internal processes, independently of any particular stimuli (see Stawarczyk et al. 2013 ). Or one could argue that distraction, especially sustained distraction, is a legitimate mind wandering as well.

A third way to characterize mind wandering is not in terms of its contents, but rather its dynamics. So, e.g., Christoff et al. (2016) characterize mind wandering as a species of spontaneous thought, with distinct dynamics. Mind wandering is distinguished from creative thought, and rumination, and other types of mental episodes, by relation to the presence or absence of various constraints on the episode (e.g., what they call “deliberate” and “automatic” constraints).

From a certain height, it appears that these different characterizations may not be in competition. Perhaps there are many routes to mind wandering. Perhaps some of them overlap. Perhaps different questions can be answered by focusing on certain routes in certain contexts. Reasonably, Seli et al. (2018) have recently argued in favor of mind wandering as a natural kind, with different sub-types grouped together by relations akin to family resemblance: “We propose that the field acknowledge mind-wandering to be a multidimensional and fuzzy construct encompassing a family of experiences with common and unique features” (2018, 482).

Methodological and conceptual clarity will simply require, in empirical manuscripts, something like the following sentence: “Here, we conceptualized mind-wandering as ________, and operationally defined it for our participants as ________.” Critically, this approach allows researchers the freedom to study whatever features of mind-wandering they wish, while providing the required specificity about aspects of the experience being explored. (488)

In the same spirit, I note here the sub-type of mind wandering that concerns me. I am interested in unintentional mind wandering—episodes of mind wandering that are neither initiated nor governed by any reportable intention of the agent. This category may cross-cut any relationship to external stimuli, in the sense that unintentional mind wandering could be externally or internally initiated. And it may demonstrate dynamics that are distinct from other sub-types of mind wandering.

Unintentional mind wandering could in principle happen non-consciously. But the literature on human mind wandering has it pegged as a feature of the conscious mind. That is to say, when the mind wanders, what wanders is the stream of consciousness—processes of conscious mentation. So, one key way to study mind wandering is to ask people whether or how often their mind has wandered. People offer reports about it. They recognize that they have been mind wandering. This is not because of mind wandering’s phenomenological signature. It is rather because people have a sense that they were once up to something, and then, more or less unbeknownst to them, they began to be up to something else. Thomas Metzinger (2013) speaks of this as the self-representational blink: an unnoticed shift from pursuing one task to doing whatever it is we do when the mind wanders. Recognizing that your mind has been wandering is always slightly surprising, because you did not plan for things to go in that way. From your perspective, it seems that they just did .

This is puzzling. But calling a mental episode unintentional need not imply that mind wandering is maladaptive, or that it has no function. Indeed, the very frequency with which it occurs had led many to suggest that it must have some functional role (e.g., Baird et al. 2011 ). It may not, of course. Perhaps, we survive in spite of how mentally addled we all are. But it is at least plausible that there is a function.

Some accounts of mind wandering might be taken to deny this. McVay and Kane (2010a ) and Kane and McVay (2012) , e.g., have argued that mind wandering reflects a failure of executive control. They note that a negative correlation exists between working memory capacity and a tendency to experience task-unrelated thoughts (see also Randall et al. 2014 ). Some such correlation is plausible. When one experiences task-unrelated mentation, something has clearly gone wrong. One has failed to stay on task.

But this also fails to imply that mind wandering has no function. Kane and McVay note that the correlation between working memory capacity and task-unrelated thought is not terribly strong: “WMC accounts for only about 5% of the variability in [task-unrelated thought] TUT rates (and vice versa)” (2012, 352). It is possible that mind wandering is both a failure in one sense and adaptive in another.

[W]e found evidence for the hypothesis that cognitive control abilities are specifically involved in the flexible adjustment of mind-wandering to task demands. As was hypothesized, high-WMC participants showed higher levels of TUT adjustment than did low-WMC participants. Thus, a more flexible coordination of the stream of thought appears to be characteristic of high-WMC individuals: They engage in TUTs when situational demands are low but reduce TUTs in attention-demanding situations. (1313)

This hypothesis is consistent with work that has demonstrated that as cognitive control resources diminish with age, the propensity to mind wander diminishes as well ( Maillet and Schacter 2016 ).

If we are to believe that mind wandering is associated with deployments of cognitive control, we need evidence that when agents mind wander, they engage in thought processes that may be beneficial. Some evidence for this is that when agents mind wander, their thoughts very frequently go to non-occurrent goals and needs, and to mentation about how to satisfy these goals in the future ( Klinger 1999 ; Baird et al. 2011 ).

Indeed, as Irving and Thompson (2019) note, it seems that it is possible to manipulate the content of mind wandering episodes by giving agents specific goals. Morsella et al. (2010) told some participants they would, in the near future, have to answer questions about the states in America. Then they gave the participants a different task. About 70 percent of these participants’ task-unrelated thoughts were about U.S. geography. Similarly, Mac Giolla et al. (2017) gave some participants a real future task, and told different participants to only pretend to have (or to lie about having) the same future task. Those participants with genuine intentions reported much more spontaneous thought about the future task than participants without genuine intentions.

It is also possible to manipulate mind wandering by reminding agents of their goals. Kopp et al. (2015) had participants either construct a list of their plans for the week or list features of a car. Participants then performed a reading task. Participants who had just reviewed a set of their own plans and goals reported much more mind wandering during the reading.

There is thus an apparent tension within mind wandering. When the mind wanders (at least unintentionally), agents are distracted from the current task, and performance suffers. But when the mind wanders, it tends to find non-occurrent goals the agent possesses, generating planning that could be beneficial. What’s more, greater cognitive control is associated with increases in mind wandering, especially when task demands are low.

Recall my original question: why does the mind wander? Two related questions that could help: What causes it to start, and what explains what happens as it wanders?

My proposed answer runs through recent work on cognitive control, and on what kinds of mechanisms drive allocations of cognitive control resources. I discuss this work in the next section.

A remarkable feature of the human cognitive system is its ability to configure itself for the performance of specific tasks through appropriate adjustments in perceptual selection, response biasing and the on-line maintenance of contextual information. The processes behind such adaptability, referred to collectively as cognitive control … ( Botvinick et al. 2001 , 624)

Rouault and Koechlin likewise emphasize processes of regulation towards certain ends: “Cognitive control refers to mental processes that evolve as regulating adaptive behavior beyond basic reinforcement and associative learning processes” (2018, 106).

There is a danger here, analogous to the one just discussed regarding definitions of mind wandering, in including far too many process-types under the same heading. “Cognitive control” includes processes like the construction and maintenance of a task set, the switching from one task set to another, the deployment of attention in various ways, the deployment of inhibition, and the monitoring of an agent’s progress towards goal achievement. To get better at understanding how these processes work together (or don’t), it helps to have a label. But the nature of the system is only loosely delineated.

Given this, there is room for differing emphases. So, e.g., Adele Diamond characterizes cognitive control processes as “a family of top-down mental processes needed when you have to concentrate and pay attention, when going on automatic or relying on instinct or intuition would be ill-advised, insufficient, or impossible” (136). This characterization is useful, but not definitive. For the kind of cognitive control processes, I have in mind here might be considered top-down, but do not activate only when agents need to deploy attention. These processes operate outside of the agent’s awareness, influencing the agent’s thought and action in subtle and difficult to detect ways.

So, e.g., Kurzban et al. (2013) have argued that one subtle way cognitive control mechanisms influence thought and action is by generating an experience of effort related to the performance of some task. They hypothesize that the experience of effort is the result of sub-personal computations that determine the current task’s value, as well as the value of nearby available tasks, and output a determination of the opportunity cost of persisting on the current task. The experience of effort is hypothesized to be a signal to the agent to switch tasks.

Kurzban et al. ’s proposal has received a lot of attention. Few agree with all of the specifics, but most agree with the general perspective that sub-personal monitoring mechanisms are concerned to determine the value of succeeding in the current task, as well as the cost of continuing engagement in the current task, and are concerned to, in some sense, direct the agent or her cognitive control resources in a more fruitful way.

Perhaps the most mature theory characterizing the mechanisms that constitute the allocation of cognitive control is the Expected Value of Control theory (see Shenhav et al. 2013 , 2017 ). The general idea is that the cognitive control system “specifies how much control to exert according to a rational cost-benefit analysis, weighing these effort costs against attendant rewards for achieving one’s goals” ( Lieder et al. 2018 , 2). Lieder et al. add to this idea a sophisticated model of how the cognitive control system might come to learn the value of the various control signals it can deploy, and might rely upon what it learns to guide cognition in adaptive ways.

Lieder et al. characterize the position the cognitive control system is typically in as a Markov decision process, specified over certain parameters, driven by reinforcement learning. Those parameters are the initial state of the system, the set of states the system could be in, the set of possible actions (or moves, or operations) the system could take, the conditional probabilities of transitioning between states, and a reward function. Lieder et al. further characterize the actions the system could take as “control signals that specify which computations the controlled systems should perform” (4).

Given this setup, the main aim is to maximize reward via the specification of control signals. The way the system does this is by way of learning algorithms. The system builds and updates a model that specifies transition probabilities between states given different control signals, and that maps these probabilities onto a reward function. The reward function balances the reward associated with an outcome (a new state), together with the computational costs of specifying the computation required to drive the system towards the outcome. So, what the system is designed to do is to take the action (specify the control signal or the package of control signals) that has the highest expected value, given the probabilities of where the action takes the system, and the costs of taking the action.

The hypothesis here is that “the cognitive control system learns to predict the context-dependent value of alternative control signals” (5), and that these predictions determine which actions the system takes.

In cases in which the context is relatively well-known, Lieder et al. posit that the system will depend upon relationships between features of the internal state of the agent and features of the context, and will perform weighted sum calculations to determine the value of various possible actions. Cases in which the context is not well-known are more difficult. But Lieder et al. propose that in such cases the system may utilize exploration strategies to teach itself the value of various actions in the novel situation. These exploration strategies involve drawing samples of the value of control signals in previously encountered contexts, averaging over them, and again selecting the control signal that provides the highest expected value.

Lieder et al. note that “This model is very general and can be applied to model cognitive control of many different processes” (6). And they offer a proof of concept for it, by demonstrating that their model outperforms alternative models across a range of processing types.

These processing types involve learning what features of a task are predictive of reward. Some of them are quite simple. One task on which their model performed well-involved learning where to allocate attention, based upon variable reward offered for attending to different locations. A second task involved learning the difference between colors that indicate reward, and colors that do not. That the model predicts basic learning of this sort is good, but not too surprising.

The expected value of computation depends not only on the rewards for correct performance but also on the difficulty of the task. In easy situations, such as the congruent trials of the Stroop task, the automatic response can be as accurate, faster, and less costly than the controlled response. In cases like this, the expected value of exerting control is less than the EVOC of exerting no control. By contrast, in more challenging situations, such as incongruent Stroop trials, the controlled process is more accurate and therefore has a positive EVOC as long as accurate performance is sufficiently important. Therefore, on incongruent trials the expected value of control is larger than the EVOC of exerting no control. Our model thus learns to exert control on incongruent trials but not on congruent trials. Our model achieves this by learning to predict the EVOC from features of the stimuli. This predicts that people should learn to exert more control when they encounter a stimulus feature (such as a color or word) that is predictive of incongruence than when they encounter a feature that is predictive of congruence. (19)

Of course, agents are rarely aware that a system (or coordinated collection of mechanisms) within them is busy learning the value of different modes of responding, and guiding the way that they deploy cognitive control resources. We are not here explaining explicit deliberation or planning. But we are getting insight into the processes—sub-personal, if you like—that create the cognitive ocean in which more explicit processes swim. What’s more, we are getting insight into the kinds of learning that drive cognitive control operations that agents have to simply live with. Shifts of attention, pulls to engage in various computational operations, a sense of what operations are valuable in what contexts—these are rarely things we explicitly consider. Rather, we depend upon this background to engage in explicit cognition and intentional action.

With this as background, I can suggest an interesting possibility, leading to a proposal regarding the etiology and function of mind wandering.

The possibility is this. Depending on the cognitive control system’s model of the value of various control signals, in cases containing relatively little expected value the system may select a package of control signals leading to exploration. These would be cases in which the goal is to find a new and better goal. And the method, which remains here unclear—although one could imagine it involving shifts of attention, construction of task sets involving imagination, inhibition of current goals, etc.—might be generally described as disengagement from the present task in order to set out upon a search for a more valuable task.

The cognitive control proposal, then, is this. Mind wandering is caused by the cognitive control system precisely when, and because, the expected value of whatever the agent is doing—usually, exercising control towards the achievement of some occurrent goal—is deemed too low, and this “too low” judgment generates a search for a better goal, or task. Perhaps, e.g., the estimation of expected value dips below a value threshold attached to the package of control signals that generate exploration for another goal, or task. Or perhaps the value is always computed in comparison with available options, such that mind wandering is sometimes initiated even in the face of a rewarding current task.

This is a straightforwardly empirical proposal, and should be assessed in terms of the explanations it affords, and by whether the predictions it makes are confirmed or disconfirmed. Before I discuss explanation and prediction, however, I wish to note two things.

First, it would certainly be useful if the cognitive control system contained such an operation. Humans are sophisticated agents, with multiple needs and goals potentially in play in most waking life situations. Fixation on one goal alone, or working towards the satisfaction of one goal at a time, is not a great strategy for flourishing. For, first, if one gets stuck on a difficult goal, or if it becomes apparent (i.e. apparent at least to some system tasked with calculating such a thing) that the present goal is not as rewarding as once calculated, it is much wiser to disengage and seek a better goal. And, second, in many situations progress towards multiple goals at once is possible. All one needs is the capacity to divide attention somewhat, or the capacity to hold multiple goals in mind—or at least within some accessible place—and one might waste much less time. Notice, further, that the above points may hold even if dividing the mind amongst multiple goals leads to performance decrements. Perfect performance is not always required. So long as mediocre performance allows one to satisfy goals and needs, accepting mediocre performance will be a good strategy.

Second, explicit cognitive control already does contain such an operation. Sometimes a task becomes too effortful, too uncomfortable, or too boring. Sometimes—after one has just awakened from a long nap, e.g.—there’s no obvious task at hand. In such cases performing a search for a high-value goal is a familiar operation that we perform explicitly. In other cases, we do not leave behind the current task, but we rather utilize deliberation, prospection, imagination, and other processes in order to find sub-goals, or means to achieve the goal that is currently structuring behavior. These modes of exploration towards discovery of a high-value goal are explicit. Our question here is whether the cognitive control system implicitly—i.e., in the absence of an explicit or conscious formation of intention to do so—initiates mind wandering as a similar mode of exploration, and for similar reasons. The proposal is that it does.

Here are explanations this proposal affords.

First, this proposal offers an explanation for the initiation of mind wandering episodes. These episodes are initiated without the agent’s explicit consent. But they do frequently occur. One possible explanation is that the agent necessarily loses control in these instances. That characterizes the initiation of a mind wandering episode as random. A better explanation, I submit, is that while the initiation of a mind wandering episode is, in one sense, a failure—a failure of the current goal and task set to persist—it is, in another sense, a smart move. It is smart because it results from a cognitive control system that is more or less constantly attempting to determine the value of selecting packages of control signals, and that will act when discrepancies in value are calculated. Note, incidentally, that this could be extended to cases in which the agent is pursuing no particular goal, or has no current task. The system need not always compare value between goals. It might be useful, e.g., to tag expected levels of reward to particular environments, perhaps by averaging over the kinds of rewards an environment-type provides. If agents associate one type of environment—a party, e.g.,—to a plethora of rewarding experiences, then a signal that this environment is near—one can hear party music, e.g.,—might lead the mind to wander in the direction of the kinds of experiences the rewarding environment provides.

The fact that the initiation of mind wandering episodes is smart helps to additionally explain a second fact, namely, that agents with higher levels of cognitive control mind wander more frequently when the current task is easy or non-rewarding.

This is not to deny that mind wandering episodes may sometimes be initiated by affectively salient stimuli, or other distractors. Nor is it to deny the existence of completely unguided, or otherwise guided, episodes of mind wandering. I am not in a position to deny that, e.g., a case of spreading activation in a semantic network could qualify as unintentional mind wandering. It may very well be—indeed it seems plausible—that only some cases of unintentional mind wandering are controlled in the way I here propose. Note, however, that even if this is right, the cognitive control system may be able to interact with uncontrolled mind wandering processes. In some cases, uncontrolled mind wandering could be commandeered if a valuable goal suggests itself.

Third, this proposal offers an explanation for the fact that mind wandering episodes tend to go to other goals the agent possesses. This is a natural place for a process to go if that process is structured by an aim to find a more rewarding goal than the one from which the agent has just disengaged. For it will be much more cost-effective to find existent goals, perhaps by querying memory, than to explore the environment and to construct entirely new goals (although of course this may happen, especially when the environment easily affords novel and rewarding goals).

Fourth, this proposal might be integrated with extant explanations of aspects of mind wandering. Consider, e.g., the decoupling hypothesis ( Antrobus et al. 1970 ; Smallwood et al. 2003 ; Smallwood and Schooler 2006 )—the idea that once mind wandering is underway, domain-general cognitive processes are engaged to maintain the mind wandering episode, by keeping attention decoupled from perceptual input, and by aiding the “continuity and integrity” of the agent’s train of thought ( Smallwood 2013 , 524). As Smallwood (2013) notes, the decoupling hypothesis does not seek to explain the initiation of mind wandering. The cognitive control proposal is consistent with it. That is, the proposal is consistent with domain-general resources being deployed to assist mind wandering episodes. The main comment I wish to make here is that the decoupling hypothesis becomes more plausible, and data on the deployment of domain-general resources in mind wandering more transparent, if the entire process of mind wandering can be seen as goal-directed, where the goal is set by the cognitive control system.

This proposal is also consistent with work on the recruitment of neural areas during mind wandering. Christoff et al. , e.g. ( Christoff et al. 2009 ; Fox et al. 2015 ), have found that episodes of mind wandering recruited not only core areas of the default mode network—medial PFC, posterior cingulate/precuneus, and posterior temporoparietal cortex—but also dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, “the 2 main regions of the executive network” ( Christoff et al. 2009 , 8722). Christoff et al. plausibly link the involvement of the executive network with task performance decrements. The cognitive control proposal adds the possibility that executive network recruitment is associated with the goal-directed nature of (at least some) unintentional mind wandering.

Consider, further, recent work on the dynamics of mind wandering. In a recent review, Christoff et al. (2016) rightly notice that much research on mind wandering has been content-based, “assessing the contents of thoughts in terms of their relationship to an ongoing task or activity” (722). They seek, instead, to offer a taxonomy of thought-types in terms of their dynamics—of how they operate over time. They propose two dimensions along which the dynamics of thought may be influenced. The first dimension is characterized in terms of the degree to which thought is constrained by mechanisms that are “flexible, deliberate, and implemented through cognitive control” (719). The paradigm here is the intentional generation of a deliberative process, or the intentional maintenance of attention on a task. The second dimension is characterized in terms of the degree to which thought is constrained by mechanisms that are automatic, in that they “operate outside of cognitive control to hold attention on a restricted set of information” (719). There are many ways thought may be automatically distracted—Christoff et al. mention affectively salient stimuli as one example.

Within our framework, mind-wandering can be defined as a special case of spontaneous thought that tends to be more-deliberately constrained than dreaming, but less-deliberately constrained than creative thinking and goal-directed thought. In addition, mind-wandering can be clearly distinguished from rumination and other types of thought that are marked by a high degree of automatic constraints, such as obsessive thought. (719)

Now, this is not an explanation of why the mind wanders. It is, instead, a mapping of mind wandering onto a broader taxonomy of cognitive kinds, with special attention given to other modes of spontaneous thought. This taxonomy is useful for a number of reasons. For example, Christoff et al. map their taxonomy onto areas of the brain. So they say, e.g., that the part of the default network that centers on the medial temporal lobe is likely to be involved in the generation of mind wandering, as well as, via “its involvement in contextual associative processing” (724), the conceptual variability of some episodes of mind wandering. They also link the hippocampus to mind wandering, suggesting that it may contribute to the “imaginative construction” of hypothetical scenarios. Such mapping work from aspects of spontaneous thought onto activity patterns in large-scale brain networks affords fruitful suggestions for future study of the kinds of psychological patterns and activities that characterize mind wandering over time.

But there are possibilities and explanations that this approach does not (yet) address, and that potentially have consequences for the taxonomy of cognitive kinds that they offer.

Creative thinking may be unique among other spontaneous-thought processes because it may involve dynamic shifts between the two ends of the spectrum of constraints. The creative process tends to alternate between the generation of new ideas, which would be highly spontaneous, and the critical evaluation of these ideas, which could be as constrained as goal-directed thought in terms of deliberate constraints and is likely to be associated with a higher degree of automatic constraints than goal-directed thought because creative individuals frequently use their emotional and visceral reactions (colloquially often referred to as “gut” reactions) while evaluating their own creative ideas. (Box 1, 720)

I suggest that mind wandering is similarly complex. If the cognitive control proposal is correct, then in at least some cases mind wandering is initiated by processes of cognitive control, even though the goal driving mind wandering is not set explicitly by the agent. This could be captured by adding layers onto Christoff et al. ’s taxonomy, deepening explanations of the etiology and function of each kind of spontaneous thought. And these deeper explanations at each place could be expected to bear fruit for understanding the dynamics of spontaneous thought. In particular, we might hope to find patterns in the neural dynamics that are predictive of the onset as well as the termination of mind wandering episodes, and that differentiate it from dreaming, creative thought, and perhaps from rumination. If the cognitive control proposal is correct, one task would be to map these patterns onto the expected value calculations the cognitive control system is performing. We would expect the dynamics of mind wandering to reflect the initiation of a search for a more rewarding goal, and to reflect attempts to make progress on this search. But now I’m jumping ahead, to predictions the proposal generates.

The cognitive control proposal makes predictions. Confirmation of these would be good news; disconfirmation would be bad news.

First, given the explanation offered for the initiation of mind wandering episodes, the proposal predicts that increases in reward for satisfying an occurrent goal would correlate with decreases in propensity to mind wander. It is well-confirmed that increasing reward leads to boosts in performance level, and to overcoming any purported “ego-depletion,” even for very boring tasks. Paradigms that have established this result could be used to test for the place of mind wandering in the behavioral data.

Second, the proposal predicts that increases in reward for non-occurrent goals the agent possesses would increase mind wandering. We have already seen that reminding agents of goals they possess, or of goals they will soon need to attempt to satisfy, leads to more mind wandering in the direction of these goals. The prediction here is more specific. If one were to, e.g., notify participants that they were soon to perform a task associated with some level of reward, and then to put participants through a low reward task, the prediction is that tendency to mind wander towards this task would be associated with the discrepancy in reward between the current and upcoming task.

Third, this proposal draws upon a view of the cognitive control system on which the learning of values associated with goals, and the learning of values associated with stimuli features predictive of goals, is crucial. So the proposal, plus plausible assumptions about reinforcement learning processes, predicts that it is possible to train participants to associate stimuli with certain goals, and that registration of such stimuli would generate mind wandering to the degree that the associated goal is rewarding. Very costly goals would produce little mind wandering. Cheap but rewarding goals would produce more.

And it may be possible to extend this result. It depends on what the agent associates with rewarding goals. Above I suggested that the system need not always compare value between explicit goals, and that the value computation might include an association between expected levels of reward and particular environments. If so, simply placing an agent in such environments would manipulate levels of unintentional mind wandering.

It may be useful to distinguish predictions this proposal makes from a related proposal: the current concerns hypothesis. The current concerns hypothesis (for which, see Klinger et al. 1973 ; Smallwood and Schooler 2006 ) has it that mind wandering is caused by a shift in salience—when one’s current goals (or concerns: here I use these terms interchangeably), become more salient than the external environment, one’s mind begins to wander. As Smallwood explains the view, “attention will be most likely to shift to self-generated material when such information offers larger incentive value than does the information in the external environment” (2013, 524). This proposal is distinct from mine in the following ways. First, I propose a specific mechanism, connected with recent modeling work in cognitive control, to explain the onset of mind wandering. Thus far, of course, the proposal can be seen as a specification of the current concerns hypothesis. Second, this mechanism initiates mind wandering not by turning attention to one’s current concerns, but by directed thought to search for a more valuable goal than the present one. So the cognitive control proposal makes predictions the current concerns hypothesis does not. For example, the cognitive control proposal predicts that propensity to mind wander could be increased by devaluing the present goal, independently of the salience of any of one’s current goals. That is, no matter how much one’s current goals or concerns lack salience, once could increase mind wandering by devaluing the occurrent goal. And it predicts that mind wandering will not turn directly to one’s other goals—the mind may wander to the environment, rather than to internal concerns, since this is one way the agent may attempt to find a more rewarding task. So we should, e.g., be able to find episodes of more intense environmental scanning as a part of the mind wandering episode. Indeed, if the environment is expected to contain valuable options, one would predict that this is where attention will go, rather than to any internal space of concerns.

This is not to deny that mind wandering represents a failure in some sense. McVay and Kane (2010b ) have argued that mind wandering represents an executive control failure. What fails is a process of goal maintenance: “we suggest that goal maintenance is often hijacked by task-unrelated thought (TUT), resulting in both the subjective experience of mind wandering and habit-based errors” (324). The possibility I am raising is that failures of goal-maintenance could in another sense be successes of a different process. Indeed, perhaps processes of goal-maintenance are closely related to the value-based process of estimating the expected value of continuing on some task, or of searching for a new task, that I propose underlies unintentional mind wandering.

In sum, the proposal is plausible on its face. If correct, it promises to explain a range of data regarding mind wandering, and to explain the—from the agent’s conscious perspective very puzzling—initiation of mind wandering episodes. The proposal may also contribute to explanations of the dynamics of mind wandering. The predictions this proposal makes are testable, and work in this direction might take steps towards further integrating knowledge of how cognitive control works with knowledge of how mind wandering works.

I wish finally to relate this proposal to two leading philosophical accounts of mind wandering. Both of these accounts aim to capture mind wandering quite generally. I have noted in Mind wandering section that this is not my aim. Here, I want only to discuss implications for these more general accounts of mind wandering, if the cognitive control proposal about unintentional mind wandering is on track.

[T]he ability to control the conscious contents of one’s mind in a goal-directed way, by means of attentional or cognitive agency. This ability can be a form of rational self-control, which is based on reasons, beliefs, and conceptual thought, but it does not have to be. What is crucial is the “veto component”: Being mentally autonomous means that all currently ongoing processes can in principle be suspended or terminated. This does not mean that they actually are terminated, it just means that the ability, the functional potential, is given and that the person has knowledge of this fact. M-autonomy is the capacity for causal self-determination on the mental level. (2013, 4)

I think the brush strokes Metzinger uses are too broad. I doubt we have veto control over every conscious process ongoing at a time. But I do think he locates an interesting phenomenon. In unintentional mind wandering, our knowledge (or awareness) that we might suspend, terminate, or re-direct aspects of the stream of consciousness lapses.

My question is this. Should we think of this lapse as the agent’s loss of control? As Metzinger has it, mind wandering essentially involves a lack of ability, and a lack of control—what he calls veto control. I agree that unintentional mind wandering does involve a loss of one kind of control. But I would underline the fact that there are multiple ways for a system to exercise control. Some of these involve consciousness in crucial ways. Some likely do not ( Shepherd 2015 ). Knowledge that one can exercise control in some way at a moment can be useful. But a system may be well-designed, and exercise control in finding or executing goals, even if the system is not explicitly aware of processes that are performing these functions at a time.

Further, there are multiple ways for a system or an agent to possess an ability. The mind wandering agent may lack the ability to suspend, terminate, or re-direct elements of the stream of consciousness in virtue of her knowledge or awareness that she can do so. But she may retain the ability to suspend, terminate, or re-direct elements of the stream of consciousness in virtue of other features—perhaps in virtue of signals that emanate from the cognitive control processes I have emphasized.

This is not a merely verbal distinction. It is about how we understand the constitution of agency, and the kinds of properties that should be ascribed to mind wandering. If the cognitive control proposal is right, mind wandering emerges as an interesting case in which the seams of agency pull apart somewhat—we fail to notice that a non-conscious mechanism has turned the stream of consciousness in a different direction. But there may be good functional reasons for this operation, and it may contribute to an agent’s overall capacities to control the self in various environments and contexts.

An agent A’s attention is unguided if and only if A is not habitually guided to focus her attention on any information. In particular, she does not satisfy the counter-factual condition for attentional guidance: There is no information i such that, if A’s attention isn’t focused on i, she will notice, feel discomfited by, and thereby be disposed to correct this fact. (567)

I am not sure this is right. Mind wandering episodes are sometimes short. Sometimes they stop, it seems to me, precisely because we feel a sense that we were recently up to something, and we feel a pull to return. The cognitive control proposal might be able to explain this—one good move for the cognitive control system, in case of a failure to find a more rewarding task or goal, would be to return to the previous task.

Irving is aware that when it wanders, the mind frequently circles back to the agent’s goals. Does this not suggest guidance of some sort? Irving explains the tension by distinguishing between guidance and motivation. Motivated behavior only requires that an agent’s beliefs, desires, or goals are causal antecedents of the behavior. Guided behavior, by contrast, is explicated in terms of dynamics: it “involves the online monitoring and regulation of behavior” (563). Irving claims that mind wandering may be motivated, but it is not guided.

This aspect of Irving’s account does not compare favorably with the cognitive control proposal—if, of course, future work confirms the proposal. For Irving’s account offers no explanation of how causation by some belief or desire or goal helps explain how or why the wandering mind frequently turns to the agent’s goals. The cognitive control proposal has it that the wandering mind finds goals because that aim is what initiated and governs the mind wandering episode.

Further, if my proposal is right it is not entirely correct to think of mind wandering as unguided. It is, admittedly, not guided by any explicit intention the agent forms. In one sense of “guided,” then, Irving is right. But on the cognitive control proposal, mind wandering is a cognitive control process, and it does have a purpose. It seems purposeless to us in part because it is an interesting case in which some of the seams of agency pull apart somewhat—we do not notice that a non-conscious mechanism has turned the stream of consciousness in a different direction. And it seems purposeless to us in part because the course of the stream of consciousness during mind wandering is, as the cognitive control system plans it, meandering. It is meandering because the goal is to search, to explore, until a more rewarding task is found.

If these considerations are on track, we should say that mind wandering takes the form of a conscious but non-consciously guided process the aim of which is to find a rewarding goal or task. The connection with the cognitive control system explains the guidance aspect—the functionality of mind wandering—and affords the possibility of integration with work on the dynamics of mind wandering. The non-conscious aspect of the guidance explains the air of mystery surrounding mind wandering, why it seems purposeless, and why it seems to come about randomly.

In this article, I have asked why the mind wanders. I focused on a sub-type of mind wandering—mind wandering that occurs independently of any reportable intention. I proposed that unintentional mind wandering is sometimes initiated and sustained by aspects of cognitive control. Unintentional mind wandering is caused by the cognitive control system precisely when, and because, the expected value of whatever the agent is doing—usually, exercising control towards achievement of some occurrent goal—is deemed too low, and this “too low” judgment generates a search for a better goal, or task.

This proposal generates testable predictions, and suggests open possibilities regarding the kinds of computations that may underlie unintentional mind wandering. My hope is that by connecting research on mind wandering with research on cognitive control resource allocation, fruitful strategies for modeling these computations may be taken from cognitive control research and deployed to help explain the initiation and dynamics of mind wandering episodes.

The cognitive control proposal also points us towards a fuller picture of human agency. In this picture, action control and intelligent thought are stitched together by conscious and non-conscious processes operating in concert. Future empirical work is critical to the confirmation of this picture, and to filling in the many unspecified details. This is so not least because, if the proposal I offer is on track, agents are not introspectively aware of the (good) rationale behind many mind-wandering episodes.

The author acknowledges two sources of support. First, funds from European Research Council Starting Grant 757698, awarded under the Horizon 2020 Programme for Research and Innovation. Second, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research’s Azrieli Global Scholar programme on Mind, Brain, and Consciousness.

Conflict of interest statement . None declared.

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How to Tame Your Wandering Mind

Learn to take steps to deal with distraction..

Posted April 24, 2022 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

• Understanding Attention
• Find counselling to help with ADHD
• We can tame our mind-wandering.
• Three tips can help you use mind-wandering to your advantage.
• These include making time to mind-wander and controlling your response to it.

Researchers believe that when a task isn’t sufficiently rewarding, our brains search for something more interesting to think about.

You have a big deadline looming, and it’s time to hunker down. But every time you start working, you find that, for some reason, your mind drifts off before you can get any real work done. What gives? What is this cruel trick our brains play on us, and what do we do about it?

Thankfully, by understanding why our mind wanders and taking steps to deal with distraction, we can stay on track. But first, let’s understand the root of the problem.

Why do our minds wander?

Unintentional mind-wandering occurs when our thoughts are not tied to the task at hand. Researchers believe our minds wander when the thing we’re supposed to be doing is not sufficiently rewarding, so our brains look for something more interesting to think about.

We’ve all experienced it from time to time, but it’s important to note that some people struggle with chronic mind-wandering : Though studies estimate ADHD afflicts less than 3% of the global adult population, it can be a serious problem and may require medical intervention.

For the vast majority of people, mind-wandering is something we can tame on our own—that is, if we know what to do about it. In fact, according to Professor Ethan Kross, director of the Emotion & Self Control Laboratory at the University of Michigan and author of Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It , mind-wandering is perfectly normal.

“We spend between a third to a half of our waking hours not focused on the present,” he told me in an email. “Some neuroscience research refers to our tendency to mind-wander as our ‘default state.’”

So why do we do it?

“Mind-wandering serves several valuable functions. It helps us simulate and plan for the future and learn from our past, and it facilitates creative problem-solving,” Kross explained. “Mind-wandering often gets a bad rep, but it’s a psychological process that evolved to provide us with a competitive advantage. Imagine not being able to plan for the future or learn from your past mistakes.”

Is mind-wandering bad for you?

“Like any psychological tool, however, mind-wandering can be harmful if used in the wrong context (i.e., when you’re trying to focus on a task) or inappropriately (i.e., when you worry or ruminate too much),” according to Kross. In other words, mind-wandering is a problem when it becomes a distraction. A distraction is any action that pulls you away from what you planned to do.

If, for instance, you intended to work on a big project, such as writing a blog post or finishing a proposal, but instead find yourself doing something else, you’re distracted.

The good news is that we can use mind-wandering to our advantage if we follow a few simple steps:

1. Make time to mind-wander

Mind-wandering isn’t always a distraction. If we plan for it, we can turn mind-wandering into traction. Unlike a distraction , which by definition is a bad thing, a diversion is simply a refocusing of attention and isn’t always harmful.

There’s nothing wrong with deciding to refocus your attention for a while. In fact, we often enjoy all kinds of diversions and pay for the privilege.

A movie or a good book, for instance, diverts our attention away from real life for a while so we can get into the story and escape reality for a bit.

Similarly, if you make time to allow your mind to drift and explore whatever it likes, that’s a healthy diversion, not a distraction.

The first step to mastering mind-wandering is to plan time for it. Use a schedule maker and block off time in your day to let your thoughts flow freely. You’ll likely find that a few minutes spent in contemplation can help you work through unresolved issues and lead to breakthroughs. Scheduling mind-wandering also lets you relax because you know you have time to think about whatever is on your mind instead of believing you need to act on every passing thought.

It’s helpful to know that time to think is on your calendar so you don’t have to interrupt your mind-wandering process or risk getting distracted later.

2. Catch the action

One of the difficulties surrounding mind-wandering is that by the time you notice you’re doing it, you’ve already done it. It’s an unconscious process so you can’t prevent it from happening.

The good news is that while you can’t stop your mind from wandering, you can control what you do when it happens.

Many people never learn that they are not their thoughts. They believe the voice in their head is somehow a special part of them, like their soul speaking out their inner desires and true self. When random thoughts cross their mind, they think those thoughts must be speaking some important truth.

Not true. That voice in your head is not your soul talking, nor do you have to believe everything you think.

When we assign undue importance to the chatter in our heads, we risk listening to half-baked ideas, feeling shame for intrusive thoughts, or acting impulsively against our best interests.

A much healthier way to view mind-wandering is as brain static. Just as the random radio frequencies you tune through don’t reveal the inner desires of your car’s soul, the thoughts you have while mind-wandering don’t mean much—unless, that is, you act upon them.

Though it can throw us off track, mind-wandering generally only lasts a few seconds, maybe minutes. However, when we let mind-wandering turn into other distractions, such as social-media scrolling, television-channel surfing, or news-headline checking, that’s when we risk wasting hours rather than mere minutes.

If you do find yourself mentally drifting off in the middle of a task, the important thing is to not allow that to become an unintended action, and therefore a distraction.

An intrusive thought is not your fault. It can’t be controlled. What matters is how you respond to it—hence the word respon-sibility.

Do you let the thought go and stay on task? Or do you allow yourself to escape what you’re doing by letting it lead you toward an action you’ll later regret?

3. Note and refocus

Can we keep the helpful aspects of mind-wandering while doing away with the bad? For the most part, yes, we can.

According to Kross, “Mind-wandering can easily shift into dysfunctional worry and rumination. When that happens, the options are to refocus on the present or to implement tools that help people mind-wander more effectively.”

One of the best ways to harness the power of mind-wandering while doing an important task is to quickly note the thought you don’t want to lose on a piece of paper. It’s a simple tactic anyone can use but few bother to do. Note that I didn’t recommend an app or sending yourself an email. Tech tools are full of external triggers that can tempt us to just check “one quick thing,” and before we know it, we’re distracted.

Rather, a pen and Post-it note or a notepad are the ideal tools to get ideas out of your head without the temptations that may lead you away from what you planned to do.

Then, you can collect your thoughts and check back on them later during the time you’ve planned in your day to chew on your ideas. If you give your thoughts a little time, you’ll often find that those super important ideas aren’t so important after all.

If you had acted on them at the moment, they would have wasted your time. But by writing them down and revisiting them when you’ve planned to do so, they have time to marinate and may become less relevant.

However, once in a while, an idea you collected will turn out to be a gem. With the time you planned to chew on the thought, you may discover that mind-wandering spurred you to a great insight you can explore later.

By following the three steps above, you’ll be able to master mind-wandering rather than letting it become your master.

Nir Eyal, who has lectured at Stanford's Graduate School of Business and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, is the author of Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life.

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Why Your Mind Wanders While Reading & How To Stop It

This post contains affiliate links.

You’re reading a new book and after a few pages in you completely forgot what you just read. Turns out, your mind was wandering while you were reading. Sounds familiar? As an avid reader, I’ve had plenty of experiences like this and have found a way to live with it which I’m going to share with you.

Your mind wanders likely because you have a short attention span. By listening to music that is 50-80 bpm, incorporating rest breaks, and breaking the reading materials into sections, my mind wandered less and I was able to focus more on what I’m reading.

Ahead, we will look at some of the most common reasons why your mind wanders. We will also look at some strategies you can use to stop your mind from wandering while reading.

Why Your Mind Wanders While You’re Reading

Wondering what causes your mind to wander while you’re reading a book? Here are some of the most common reasons.

You’re Processing Too Much Information at Once

One reason why your mind might wander while you’re reading is that you’re trying to process too much information at once.

When you’re bombarded with a lot of information, your brain has trouble focusing on any of it.

To avoid this, try to break down the material into smaller chunks. For example, if you’re reading a chapter in a book, read one section at a time and then understand it.

Some books split a chapter into sections which makes it so much easier to read.

Or if you’re reading an article online, read one section at a time and then scroll down to the next section.

The Book Bores You

Another reason why your mind might wander while you’re reading is that you’re bored. If you find yourself zoning out or daydreaming, it’s likely because the material isn’t interesting to you.

If you’ve been reading a lot, you probably experienced this at least once.

I have multiple times. And even though The Intelligent Investor is considered by Warren Buffet as the best investing book of all time, I just can’t read it without my mind wandering.

You’re Reading In A Busy Environment

If you’re trying to read in a place where there are a lot of distractions, it’s going to be a lot more difficult to focus.

Your mind will wander because it’s constantly trying to process all of the different stimuli around you.

You Have A Short Attention Span

If you find that your mind wanders often, it could be because you have a short attention span.

There are several “tricks” that could boost your attention span a bit longer which we will talk about in the next subheading.

But ultimately, if you have a short attention span consider practicing meditation daily.

And since most of us have a short attention span (according to a study, our attention dropped from 12 seconds in the year 2000 to just 8 seconds today . Yikes! ), it’d probably help a lot if we could just get the key insights of the book and apply them to our lives.

Luckily, you can do that now.

Blinkist is an educational program that gives you the key insights into more than 5,000 nonfiction book titles in 15 to 20 mins each.

That way, you can skip through the fluff, get the information you need while you’re attention is full, and move on to the next book.

If you like what it does, you can save 20% off your first year if you sign up through this link .

You Read Too Slow

Jim Kwik, the author of Limitless , has a very good analogy for this.

Reading a book is like driving a car. If you drive slow, your mind wanders. You can sing along to your favorite music, drink some smoothies, or talk to your best bud.

But what if you’re driving on a race track? Suddenly, you’re in hyperfocus on the road.

His argument was, that it’s the same for reading. And frankly, for some books, I kinda agree.

Speed reading is a great tool to have when you’re an avid reader. And if you’re wondering why you read too slow, I listed the most common reasons in another article.

Related post: Can You Really Learn To Read Faster? (Based on Experience)

How To Stop Your Mind From Wandering

Now that we’ve looked at some of the reasons why your mind wanders while you’re reading, let’s look at some strategies you can use to stop it.

Find More Engaging Material

If you find that your mind wanders often, one of the best things you can do is to find more engaging material.

You can also try looking for material that’s more interesting to you. This could mean reading a book that’s more exciting or finding articles online that are better written.

Try Listening To Music

In the book Limitless , Jim Kwik shared a very simple tip to focus better—listening to music.

Studies have shown that listening to music with a beat of 50-80 bpm can help you focus.

Baroque music seems to be better at stimulating your brain to focus compared to other types of music.

But, if you can’t stand the sound of classics, stick to music without any lyrics on them to prevent your mind from singing along.

Take Breaks

You can also try taking breaks every 20 minutes or so. This will give your mind a chance to rest and reset.

There’s a method I use called the Promodoro and it has changed the way I read dramatically.

Basically, Promodoro is alternate bouts of 25 work (in this case, reading) and 5 mins rest.

I found that I am able to read the book faster and retain more information by reading that way.

During the rest, do absolutely nothing or just do something that relaxes you.

Don’t scroll through your Facebook or Instagram feed.

In my experience, the content from these platforms often leads me to mental wandering, and distraction. And in some cases, I’d even skip my next bout of 25 mins work just to continue scrolling.

Find A Quiet Place

Find a quiet place where you can focus on your reading. This could be in a library, in your bedroom, or even in a park.

The key is to find a place where you won’t be interrupted and where there aren’t a lot of distractions.

Eliminate Distractions

Eliminate as many distractions as possible. This means putting away your phone, turning off the TV, and closing any tabs that you’re not using.

The goal is to create an environment where you can focus solely on your reading.

Practice Meditation

If you find that your mind wanders often, it could be because you have a short attention span. One way to increase your attention span is to practice meditation.

Meditation has been shown to increase focus and concentration. It also helps to train your mind to be more present.

Start by meditating for 5 minutes a day and then gradually increase the amount of time you meditate each day.

How Can You Tell When Your Mind Has Wandered Off?

There are a few telltale signs that your mind has wandered off when reading.

First, you may find that you’re losing track of what you’re reading. You might have to reread the same section multiple times or have trouble following the plot.

Secondly, you may start daydreaming or thinking about other things. This can be a sign that you’re not engaged with the material.

Finally, you may feel restless or antsy. If you can’t sit still while you’re reading, it’s likely because your mind is wandering.

If you notice any of these signs, it’s a good idea to take a break and refocus your attention.

Is There A Way To Completely Stop Your Mind From Wandering While You Read?

Unfortunately, there’s no way to completely prevent your mind from wandering while you read. However, the strategies I discussed above can help you minimize the amount of time your mind spends wandering.

The key is to find what works for you and to be patient. It takes time and practice to train your mind to focus. But, if you stick with it, you’ll eventually get there.

If you find your mind wandering while you’re reading, don’t worry. It’s completely normal. However, there are a few things you can do to minimize the amount of time your mind spends wandering.

Try finding more engaging material, listening to music, taking breaks, practicing meditation, or eliminating distractions. Find what works for you and stick with it. With time and practice, you’ll be able to train your mind to focus.

Nicho Mauricio is the main author of improvementbuddy.com, a website dedicated to giving self-improvement advice. As an avid learner, Nicho shares what he learns about self-improvement one blog post at a time.

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