13 ms·

Mind Wandering: More than a Bad Habit (2018) [pdf]

143 points by rzk 2y ago

tmshapland 2y ago
Thanks for posting. Reminds me of Dan Gilbert's famous paper on the subject. He took polls of people at random times during the day when smartphones first emerged. "In conclusion, a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost." https://dtg.sites.fas.harvard.edu/KILLINGSWORTH%20&%20GILBERT%20%282010%29.pdf https://dtg.sites.fas.harvard.edu/KILLINGSWORTH%20&%20GILBER...
- ocular-rockular 2y ago
  I'm so confused. I'm trying to understand what is wrong with mind wandering but to me it doesn't seem clear.
  - yamrzou 2y ago
    Check this: Why Mind Wandering Can Be So Miserable — https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-mind-wandering-can-be-so-miserable-according-happiness-experts-180962265/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-mind-wande...
    - ocular-rockular 2y ago
      > What’s more, people’s negative moods appeared to be the result, rather than the cause, of the mind wandering. This is I think one useful take away from the article... on the other hand... > “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.” I'm so sorry but I refuse to take this seriously. The modern day obsession with optimization is off the rails and honestly is probably the thing that makes most people miserable. My man lost respect with that line of thinking. But I don't know mind wandering/daydreaming is pretty lit. I like the distraction. Yeah, sometimes it can be a not very positive experience but I feel like these researchers either fail to address or don't discuss the distinction between daydreaming and anxious thought.
      - IncreasePosts 2y ago
        I'm 100% with you on this one. I feel like people who won't like mind wandering are heavy Type-A, control-oriented personalities, who have some external objective in mind, and are unsatisfied until that objective is completed. I don't think I've ever experienced a negative mood due to mind wandering. If anything, negative moods for me result in more fixation on a problem, where my mind will not wander, and will just constantly come back to a single thing.
- even_639765 2y ago
  To say it's unhappy is not quite right, it's problem solving and running simulations whose goal is naturally and properly a source of low level anxiety - how to secure this organisms future well being. That wandering mind is conducting probability analysis on potential future events and circumstances or the same calculation on the actual nature of past events. It is trying to secure its future security, to form an ugly phrase. That's what this organism does with its mind. It runs simulations to try to predict the future in an if this, then that sort of way. That's its natural state. Seems harsh to call that "unhappy". Productive reasoning, the kind of mental activity we are proud of and covet, in this context, is really less like thinking and more like acting, like engaging in affirmative, directed action.
  - nihhhh 2y ago
    > properly a source of low level anxiety You're wrong on that, it would be more likely to produce a high level of anxiety, to ensure survival in the short term.
    - even_639765 2y ago
      No organism can sustain a high level of anxiety. We're talking about the purpose of the universal default state of mind. It can't be a state of high anxiety.
arijo 2y ago
It's interesting how mind wandering can be analysed from different perspectives: 1. In meditation the main goal is precisely to free ourselves from the monkey mind that seems to be the cause of all suffering 2. In neuroscience mind wandering is seen as the brain default mode unless we are operating within a goal driven mindset 3. This can also be seen as a kind of reinforcement learning: we train ourselves to notice when we are mind wandering - this process in itself, after some time, conditions the mind to focus on the present moment 4. From a metabolic perspective (e.g. ketogenic therapy), mind wandering can be seen as the result of blood glucose fluctuations that cause mental fogginess and impair focus In my own experience as a long time meditation practitioner, what really made the difference for me was regulating my blood glucose levels by following a ketogenic diet. The change in clarity of mind and focus were life changing to me. I write a bit on my experience in my blog: https://www.feelingbuggy.com/p/how-the-ketogenic-diet-helped-me https://www.feelingbuggy.com/p/how-the-ketogenic-diet-helped... Just my 2 cents on a fascinating subject!
- hanniabu 2y ago
  What is "monkey mind"?
  - nickvec 2y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_mind
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - Aeglaecia 2y ago
    more broadly , the difference between reacting and responding to a stimulus
  - even_639765 2y ago
    It's called reverie. The stream of thinking that you naturally have when you're not deliberately trying to focus. Essentially, one thought leading to another which leads to another and so on, without you having to make any effort. Most people identify so much with their thinking, they aren't aware of it as a "thing"; it feels like it's something you're doing. What are you thinking about? But if you try to just pay attention, say to your breath, going in and out, after a few seconds you'll discover you slipped back into thinking, as described above, back into reverie. Continued failure, despite your increasing resolve, to stay just listening to your breath reveals this fact: you can't stop "your" thinking mind from recapturing your attention. So it seems like a monkey, that is, a thing which jumps around, from thought to thought, a separate entity from you, one which will not obey you.
phaedrus 2y ago
Does mind wandering in this context refer to daydreaming or does it refer to blanking out? As someone with late-diagnosed ADHD and likely also on the spectrum, I find myself struggling with both of these. I engage in a lot of Walter Mitty-esque hyper realistic daydreams, but I also have random periods of minutes of completely blank mind. Both result in a lot of "lost time" for me throughout the day. It runs in my family such we refer to it as "the our-surname fog". Skimming this paper it's unclear to me whether the author is referring to one or the other, or both. Interestingly I'm not sure that the mind wandering is separable from my creativity and problem solving. Often I'll come out of a blank period with the answer to something without consciously having been thinking about it. I think of these periods of "lost time" in my day as background processing - it's just my misfortune I live in a world where it's not socially or economically acceptable to space out for long periods throughout the day.
- even_639765 2y ago
  I don't know about the blanking out part, but the rest of the description sounds like a regular human being. That intense daydreaming is, while not everyone's state, pretty typical of people generally. People with powerful brains just experience things intensely or deeply, including their own reverie. You should harness some of that horsepower. But you always knew that, because it's obvious
FailMore 2y ago
Mind wandering (or more precisely the activation of the default mode network) and dreaming are hugely linked. Interestingly the “direction” of the mind wandering during rem sleep is the inverse of anxious mind wandering. When we are anxious we have high levels of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine, but during rem sleep it’s 85% below base waking levels. In 2017 I wrote a paper discussing the implications for dream content and functionality. Here is the link for it: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/k6trz https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/k6trz And it was discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143590
wslh 2y ago
After skimming the article, I found it unconvincing. It feels poorly structured, almost like something a high school student might put together for a monograph. The references seem to be there to add a sense of authority, but they lack clarity. Who exactly is the article referring to? Is it talking about all human beings, specific types of people like artists, or perhaps Einstein when he was daydreaming? There are plenty of successful people who possess this trait the article critiques, which makes me wonder if one strong counterexample is enough to challenge the entire premise. In my view, the argument lacks depth and fails to consider broader, real-world examples.
- calf 2y ago
  I thought it was written by scientistic 1960s psychologists but it is actually from 2018, peak CBT pseudoscience.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
musicale 2y ago
For me, undirected mind wandering (daydreaming, background processing, actual dreaming and similar states) seems to be the best source of creative thought as well as flashes of insight. And semi-directed mind wandering (brainstorming as well as random walks down pathways of thought) seems to be essential to problem solving. However, schools and workplaces rarely appreciate any form of thinking that doesn't produce immediate tangible output with some kind of economic value.
- dwg 2y ago
  Are you certain? I appreciate your thoughts on the value of mind wandering and creative thinking. While I agree that many institutions necessarily focus on immediate outputs, I've seen interesting counterexamples - from companies institutionalizing 'free thinking time' to schools incorporating mindfulness and creative thinking exercises. There is always room for improvement, but perhaps the landscape is shifting to better recognize these different thinking modes. Or, more likely, it has always been recognized, capitalized on, and very highly appreciated when it happens to produce valuable output, probably in almost any organization not just those encouraging free thought. What has been your specific experience with this in schools or workplaces?
blueyes 2y ago
My personal goal is to make my mental happenings more visible in order to understand where I get off track while tackling a task. I think knowledge work in general is plagued by the intangibility of the processes that lead to its artifacts. Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) has a few things to say about this. (Here's Jonathan Bricker's TedX talk for a glimpse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTb3d5cjSFI&themeRefresh=1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTb3d5cjSFI&themeRefresh=1) And a lot of what ACT does happens to echo what Buddhists are trying to do in meditation. Maybe the most important aspect of mind wandering -- ie distraction -- is: what pushes us off track? In my experience, that's often a feeling of discomfort that is tied to the anticipated pain of a task. Sometimes that pain is tedium (I know what must be done and don't want to do it), other times it's complexity (I know I must do something but the exact steps are not clear), and other times it's sheer difficulty; ie I'm not breaking the task down into small enough chunks to feel able to do them. I'm looking for my own internal protocol to sense mind wandering, identify which type of perceived difficulty caused it, and then take the steps to stay on goal: if tedium, put on podcast and forge forth; if complexity, back up and unravel the vague aspiration; if sheer difficulty, break it down into small steps. I feel like the very ability to slip into metacognitive reflection depends heavily on my overall state, whether I'm doing all the right things like sleeping and exercising in order to monitor the internal course of work.
w10-1 2y ago
Interesting that they mentioned the default-mode network but not the salience network I experience mind-wandering as sampling salience signals when no signals dominate (as they do in reactivity and goal- or motor-planning). Mind-wandering presents unlike meditative absorption, when salience seems quiescent (or, conversely but rarely, sharp).
andyjohnson0 2y ago
What does it feel like to have a mind that doesn't (or only minimally) wander? I find it hard to imagine such a state. Would it even be psychologically healthy?
- fluoridation 2y ago
  The mind wanders when you're doing something repetitive that doesn't demand much attention, or when resting. So I guess if you were engaged all the time in something that requires concentration, your mind wouldn't wander.
lincpa 2y ago
[dead]
metalman 2y ago
focusing a small lense is great but it wont help inprove its optical qualities which requires many small adjusments after the fact of creating a blank lense,size, or ,light gathering ability matters,but occlusions and outside conditions can determine the useability of the image produced and as we all know,there is a concerted effort happening to review all of the past ,randomly generated data,stored on film and tape by the metric fuck ton, for the secrets that exist there and only there,in sharp focus as our relentless gazing and fidgetings will be mined some other time and then as now,there are mad shamen gleefully and deliberatly burrying hints of what is,but cant be held
banga 2y ago
Interesting article. Key takeaway for me was: “Masicampo and Baumeister (2011) provided further evidence that it is specifically unresolved goals and concerns that trigger habitual mind wandering.” ... “Remarkably, making a plan freed participants from this kind of habitual mind wandering.”

143 points by rzk 2y ago

Thanks for posting. Reminds me of Dan Gilbert's famous paper on the subject. He took polls of people at random times during the day when smartphones first emerged. "In conclusion, a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost." https://dtg.sites.fas.harvard.edu/KILLINGSWORTH%20&%20GILBERT%20%282010%29.pdf https://dtg.sites.fas.harvard.edu/KILLINGSWORTH%20&%20GILBER...

ocular-rockular 2y ago
I'm so confused. I'm trying to understand what is wrong with mind wandering but to me it doesn't seem clear.
- yamrzou 2y ago
  Check this: Why Mind Wandering Can Be So Miserable — https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-mind-wandering-can-be-so-miserable-according-happiness-experts-180962265/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-mind-wande...
  - ocular-rockular 2y ago
    > What’s more, people’s negative moods appeared to be the result, rather than the cause, of the mind wandering. This is I think one useful take away from the article... on the other hand... > “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.” I'm so sorry but I refuse to take this seriously. The modern day obsession with optimization is off the rails and honestly is probably the thing that makes most people miserable. My man lost respect with that line of thinking. But I don't know mind wandering/daydreaming is pretty lit. I like the distraction. Yeah, sometimes it can be a not very positive experience but I feel like these researchers either fail to address or don't discuss the distinction between daydreaming and anxious thought.
    - IncreasePosts 2y ago
      I'm 100% with you on this one. I feel like people who won't like mind wandering are heavy Type-A, control-oriented personalities, who have some external objective in mind, and are unsatisfied until that objective is completed. I don't think I've ever experienced a negative mood due to mind wandering. If anything, negative moods for me result in more fixation on a problem, where my mind will not wander, and will just constantly come back to a single thing.
even_639765 2y ago
To say it's unhappy is not quite right, it's problem solving and running simulations whose goal is naturally and properly a source of low level anxiety - how to secure this organisms future well being. That wandering mind is conducting probability analysis on potential future events and circumstances or the same calculation on the actual nature of past events. It is trying to secure its future security, to form an ugly phrase. That's what this organism does with its mind. It runs simulations to try to predict the future in an if this, then that sort of way. That's its natural state. Seems harsh to call that "unhappy". Productive reasoning, the kind of mental activity we are proud of and covet, in this context, is really less like thinking and more like acting, like engaging in affirmative, directed action.
- nihhhh 2y ago
  > properly a source of low level anxiety You're wrong on that, it would be more likely to produce a high level of anxiety, to ensure survival in the short term.
  - even_639765 2y ago
    No organism can sustain a high level of anxiety. We're talking about the purpose of the universal default state of mind. It can't be a state of high anxiety.

arijo 2y ago

It's interesting how mind wandering can be analysed from different perspectives: 1. In meditation the main goal is precisely to free ourselves from the monkey mind that seems to be the cause of all suffering 2. In neuroscience mind wandering is seen as the brain default mode unless we are operating within a goal driven mindset 3. This can also be seen as a kind of reinforcement learning: we train ourselves to notice when we are mind wandering - this process in itself, after some time, conditions the mind to focus on the present moment 4. From a metabolic perspective (e.g. ketogenic therapy), mind wandering can be seen as the result of blood glucose fluctuations that cause mental fogginess and impair focus In my own experience as a long time meditation practitioner, what really made the difference for me was regulating my blood glucose levels by following a ketogenic diet. The change in clarity of mind and focus were life changing to me. I write a bit on my experience in my blog: https://www.feelingbuggy.com/p/how-the-ketogenic-diet-helped-me https://www.feelingbuggy.com/p/how-the-ketogenic-diet-helped... Just my 2 cents on a fascinating subject!

hanniabu 2y ago
What is "monkey mind"?
- nickvec 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_mind
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Aeglaecia 2y ago
  more broadly , the difference between reacting and responding to a stimulus
- even_639765 2y ago
  It's called reverie. The stream of thinking that you naturally have when you're not deliberately trying to focus. Essentially, one thought leading to another which leads to another and so on, without you having to make any effort. Most people identify so much with their thinking, they aren't aware of it as a "thing"; it feels like it's something you're doing. What are you thinking about? But if you try to just pay attention, say to your breath, going in and out, after a few seconds you'll discover you slipped back into thinking, as described above, back into reverie. Continued failure, despite your increasing resolve, to stay just listening to your breath reveals this fact: you can't stop "your" thinking mind from recapturing your attention. So it seems like a monkey, that is, a thing which jumps around, from thought to thought, a separate entity from you, one which will not obey you.

phaedrus 2y ago

Does mind wandering in this context refer to daydreaming or does it refer to blanking out? As someone with late-diagnosed ADHD and likely also on the spectrum, I find myself struggling with both of these. I engage in a lot of Walter Mitty-esque hyper realistic daydreams, but I also have random periods of minutes of completely blank mind. Both result in a lot of "lost time" for me throughout the day. It runs in my family such we refer to it as "the our-surname fog". Skimming this paper it's unclear to me whether the author is referring to one or the other, or both. Interestingly I'm not sure that the mind wandering is separable from my creativity and problem solving. Often I'll come out of a blank period with the answer to something without consciously having been thinking about it. I think of these periods of "lost time" in my day as background processing - it's just my misfortune I live in a world where it's not socially or economically acceptable to space out for long periods throughout the day.

even_639765 2y ago
I don't know about the blanking out part, but the rest of the description sounds like a regular human being. That intense daydreaming is, while not everyone's state, pretty typical of people generally. People with powerful brains just experience things intensely or deeply, including their own reverie. You should harness some of that horsepower. But you always knew that, because it's obvious

FailMore 2y ago

Mind wandering (or more precisely the activation of the default mode network) and dreaming are hugely linked. Interestingly the “direction” of the mind wandering during rem sleep is the inverse of anxious mind wandering. When we are anxious we have high levels of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine, but during rem sleep it’s 85% below base waking levels. In 2017 I wrote a paper discussing the implications for dream content and functionality. Here is the link for it: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/k6trz https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/k6trz And it was discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143590

wslh 2y ago

After skimming the article, I found it unconvincing. It feels poorly structured, almost like something a high school student might put together for a monograph. The references seem to be there to add a sense of authority, but they lack clarity. Who exactly is the article referring to? Is it talking about all human beings, specific types of people like artists, or perhaps Einstein when he was daydreaming? There are plenty of successful people who possess this trait the article critiques, which makes me wonder if one strong counterexample is enough to challenge the entire premise. In my view, the argument lacks depth and fails to consider broader, real-world examples.

calf 2y ago
I thought it was written by scientistic 1960s psychologists but it is actually from 2018, peak CBT pseudoscience.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

musicale 2y ago

For me, undirected mind wandering (daydreaming, background processing, actual dreaming and similar states) seems to be the best source of creative thought as well as flashes of insight. And semi-directed mind wandering (brainstorming as well as random walks down pathways of thought) seems to be essential to problem solving. However, schools and workplaces rarely appreciate any form of thinking that doesn't produce immediate tangible output with some kind of economic value.

dwg 2y ago
Are you certain? I appreciate your thoughts on the value of mind wandering and creative thinking. While I agree that many institutions necessarily focus on immediate outputs, I've seen interesting counterexamples - from companies institutionalizing 'free thinking time' to schools incorporating mindfulness and creative thinking exercises. There is always room for improvement, but perhaps the landscape is shifting to better recognize these different thinking modes. Or, more likely, it has always been recognized, capitalized on, and very highly appreciated when it happens to produce valuable output, probably in almost any organization not just those encouraging free thought. What has been your specific experience with this in schools or workplaces?

blueyes 2y ago

My personal goal is to make my mental happenings more visible in order to understand where I get off track while tackling a task. I think knowledge work in general is plagued by the intangibility of the processes that lead to its artifacts. Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) has a few things to say about this. (Here's Jonathan Bricker's TedX talk for a glimpse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTb3d5cjSFI&themeRefresh=1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTb3d5cjSFI&themeRefresh=1) And a lot of what ACT does happens to echo what Buddhists are trying to do in meditation. Maybe the most important aspect of mind wandering -- ie distraction -- is: what pushes us off track? In my experience, that's often a feeling of discomfort that is tied to the anticipated pain of a task. Sometimes that pain is tedium (I know what must be done and don't want to do it), other times it's complexity (I know I must do something but the exact steps are not clear), and other times it's sheer difficulty; ie I'm not breaking the task down into small enough chunks to feel able to do them. I'm looking for my own internal protocol to sense mind wandering, identify which type of perceived difficulty caused it, and then take the steps to stay on goal: if tedium, put on podcast and forge forth; if complexity, back up and unravel the vague aspiration; if sheer difficulty, break it down into small steps. I feel like the very ability to slip into metacognitive reflection depends heavily on my overall state, whether I'm doing all the right things like sleeping and exercising in order to monitor the internal course of work.

w10-1 2y ago

Interesting that they mentioned the default-mode network but not the salience network I experience mind-wandering as sampling salience signals when no signals dominate (as they do in reactivity and goal- or motor-planning). Mind-wandering presents unlike meditative absorption, when salience seems quiescent (or, conversely but rarely, sharp).

andyjohnson0 2y ago

What does it feel like to have a mind that doesn't (or only minimally) wander? I find it hard to imagine such a state. Would it even be psychologically healthy?

fluoridation 2y ago
The mind wanders when you're doing something repetitive that doesn't demand much attention, or when resting. So I guess if you were engaged all the time in something that requires concentration, your mind wouldn't wander.

lincpa 2y ago

[dead]

metalman 2y ago

focusing a small lense is great but it wont help inprove its optical qualities which requires many small adjusments after the fact of creating a blank lense,size, or ,light gathering ability matters,but occlusions and outside conditions can determine the useability of the image produced and as we all know,there is a concerted effort happening to review all of the past ,randomly generated data,stored on film and tape by the metric fuck ton, for the secrets that exist there and only there,in sharp focus as our relentless gazing and fidgetings will be mined some other time and then as now,there are mad shamen gleefully and deliberatly burrying hints of what is,but cant be held

banga 2y ago

Interesting article. Key takeaway for me was: “Masicampo and Baumeister (2011) provided further evidence that it is specifically unresolved goals and concerns that trigger habitual mind wandering.” ... “Remarkably, making a plan freed participants from this kind of habitual mind wandering.”