Por: Santiago Arango-Muñoz
santiago.arango5@udea.edu.co
Universidad de Antioquia
Mind-wandering is a psychological phenomenon where the mind moves from one subject to the other in a quasi-random way. Consider, for example, the case where you get distracted from this reading by imagining your dinner. Sometimes, one realizes that one has not understood a text because one has been mind-wandering while reading. Psychologists estimate that this type of episodes comprises a great amount of our mental life (around 35–50% (Christoff, Irving, Fox, Spreng, & Andrews-Hanna, 2016; Kane, 2007; Killingsworth & Gilbert, 2010)) and they have been studying their benefits (for example, those related to creativity (Baird et al. 2012) and planning (Baird et al. 2011)) as well as their risks (for example, car accidents, deficits in understanding and reading comprehension) (Mooneyham & Schooler, 2013).
Despite the fact that mind-wandering is common in everyday life, researchers have not agreed about its nature. There are, at least, four views of mind-wandering in the existing literature: 1) Mind-wandering as task- or stimuli-unrelated thought (Callard, Smallwood, Golchert, & Margulies, 2013; Schooler et al., 2011; Smallwood & Shooler, 2006); 2) Mind-wandering as unguided attention or thought (Irving, 2015; Irving & Thompson, 2018); 3) Mind-wandering as absence of veto-control and meta-awareness (Metzinger, 2013, 2015, 2017); and 4) Mind-wandering as disunified thought (Carruthers, 2015; Dorsch, 2014).
In this project I would like to propose an alternative, but complementary, view of mind-wandering that sheds some light on its relation to mental action and metacognition. I propose that mind-wandering is not only a decoupling of the mind from external task or stimuli, or directing attention and cognitive control to another action, but rather a temporal suspension of the dynamics of mental action (i.e., mental goals, epistemic norms, and metacognition). In other words: rather than decoupled from external world, in mind-wandering the mind is decoupled from mental agency, and mental events are allowed to happen without any agentive constrain.
References:
Baird, B., Smallwood, J., Mrazek, M. D., Kam, J. W. Y., Franklin, M., & Schooler, J. W. (2012). Inspired by distraction: mind wandering facilitates creative incubation. Psychological science, 23(10), 1117-1122. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797612446024
Baird, B., Smallwood, J., & Schooler, J. W. (2011). Back to the future: Autobiographical planning and the functionality of mind-wandering. Consciousness and Cognition, 20(4), 1604-1611.
Callard, F., Smallwood, J., Golchert, J., & Margulies, D. S. (2013). The era of the wandering mind? Twenty-first century research on self-generated mental activity. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, 1-11. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00891
Carruthers, P. (2015). The centered mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Christoff, K., Irving, Z. C., Fox, K. C. R., Spreng, N., & Andrews-Hanna, J. R. (2016). Mind-wandering as spontaneous thought: A dynamic framework. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 17, 718–731. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn.2016.113
Drescher, L. H., Van den Bussche, E., & Desender, K. (2018). Absence without leave or leave without absence: Examining the interrelations among mind wandering, metacognition and cognitive control. PLoS ONE, 13(2), 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0191639
Dorsch, F. (2014). Focused Daydreaming and Mind-Wandering. Review of Philosophy and Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-014-0221-4
Fincham, J. M., Carter, C. S., van Veen, V., Sterger, V. A., & Anderson, J. R. (2002). Neural mechanisms of planning: A computational analysis using event-related fMRI. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 99, 3346–3351.
Giambra, L.-M. (1995). A laboratory based method for investigating influences on switching attention to task unrelated imagery and thought. Consciousness and Cognition, 4, 1-21.
Irving, Z. C. (2015). Mind-wandering is unguided attention: accounting for the ‘‘purposeful’’ wanderer. Philosophical Studies. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0506-1
Irving, Z. C., & Thompson, E. (2018). The Philosophy of Mind-Wandering.
Kane, M. J. (2007). Kane, M. J., et al. For whom the mind wanders, and when: An experience-sampling study of working memory and executive control in daily life. Psychological science, 19(7), 614-621.
Killingsworth, M. A., & Gilbert, D. (2010). A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science, 33(6006), 932-932.
McVay, J. C., & Kane, M. J. (2010). Does mind wandering reflect executive function or executive failure? Comment on Smallwood and Schooler (2006) and Watkins (2008). Psychological Bulletin, 136, 198-207 (Discussion pp. 198–207).
Metzinger, T. (2013). The myth of cognitive agency. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, 931-XXX.
Metzinger, T. (2015). M-Autonomy. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 22(11-12), 270-302.
Mooneyham, B. W., & Schooler, J. W. (2013). The costs and benefits of mind-wandering: a review. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, (67), 11–18.
Schooler, J. W., Smallwood, J., Christoff, K., Handy, T. C., Reichle, E. D., & Sayette, M. A. (2011). MetaDawareness, perceptual decoupling and the wandering mind. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15(7), 319–326. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2011.05.006
Smallwood, J., & Schooler, J. W. (2006). The restless mind. Psychological Bulletin, 132(6), 946-958. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.132.6.946
– On the relationship between Mind-wandering and mental health.
In the last 25 years, the study of the mind has undergone a very profound revolution (The royal Institution, 2017). Modern imaging techniques allow us to see the brain in action for the first time, and to map its structure and dynamics, giving us the possibility to have a better understanding of mind related phenomena, or, at the very least, to take a glimpse into the complex mechanisms behind consciousness. These new techniques are helping psychologists and philosophers of the mind, to ground their theories on experimental data taken directly from the brain, thus increasing the level of certainty of their work.
When I was researching general information on the topic of mind-wandering, I found that it has been studied from at least two main different approaches, the first one is from the neuroscientific point of view, which focuses on understanding its biological nature and mechanics, and the second one is the psychological/philosophical approach, which tries to determine its causes and to explain its functioning, and even some of its consequences (like the studies that you have referred to in your entry); but there seems to be another approach, very related to the second one, which tries to pin the implications of mind-wandering in mental health (and by mental health I mean overall happiness and wellbeing). This one is the main theme of this comment, but before referring to it, I would like to summarize some of the fundamental findings about this phenomenon in the field of neuroscience, since it will be relevant to the formulation of the problem.
On this regard, I found the explanation of Michael Corballis, from the University of Auckland (Creative Thinking Project, 2014), to be very informative. Based on what the scans of the brain have shown, he states that our minds never go blank. In other words, the brain is always active in many ways. The name for this spontaneous activity is “default mode network” and during its occurrence, brain activity is scattered around in a fairly random fashion; he also says that when we focus on a task, what our brain does is to concentrate this default network activity into specific areas of the brain. Finally, he explains that the hub for mind-wandering seems to be the hippocampus, and that there are two different kinds of mind-wandering, one (less controlled), carried out by the brain stem, and the other, (consciously driven), carried out by the frontal lobe.
Having said the above, I can finally address the question that got me into writing this. The connection between mental health and mind-wandering, is a subject very open to interpretation and research, and, quite worryingly, it’s also the basis of a growing business in this current era. From a clinical approach, losing the capacity to mind-wander is actually seen as a serious problem, one that may occur as a consequence of brain damage (Creative Thinking Project, 2014), but in the popular culture, we are surrounded by this inkling, capitalized by life coachers and gurus, that happiness is related with present moment awareness, (we can see it come to life in the form of common phrases like: “Be here now”, “be present”, “carpe diem”, “seize the moment”, “stop overthinking”, and so on). This whole idea is based on the belief that when our mind wanders, we lose the connection with the real world, and that happiness consists in the ability to live consciously every second of our lives; It’s also related with our fixation with productivity; in fact, we can find TED talks on how to prevent or tame this so called “problem” (Ted, 2018), or even buy drugs to “focus intensively” in order to avoid mind-wandering.
I’d like to drift back, very briefly, to the beginning of this commentary, where I stated the importance of brain scanning techniques on the studies of the mind, because, the way I see it, relating this phenomenon with happiness (or more precisely, with unhappiness), seems to be some sort of a long shot, especially because it contradicts the findings in the field of neuroscience about the regularity of this episodes in our brains. Although there have been scientific researches done on the question about the emotional consequences of this phenomenon, like the study carried out by Killingsworth & Gilbert (2010), which apparently found a link between mind wandering and unhappiness, I can’t help to notice that this research was performed under a methodology named experience sample, where participants were directly asked to report their emotional experiences, rather than by analyzing any data from the brain. I hope that, by this point, it’s clear that, with all of this, I am not trying to say that this topic does not deserve the analysis, I am very much in favor of its scientific study because here is the thing: we cannot just assume that there isn’t any connection between mind-wandering and mental health and move on.
In my opinion, topics like mind-wandering are specially interesting, among many other reasons, because of the potential social value hidden within it; by understanding the functioning, the whys, and the purposes of this phenomenon, we can help us, as a society, to re-formulate the way we understand ourselves, the way we set our goals, and more importantly, the way we treat ourselves. I believe that this view that you are proposing in your project, could have a direct and positive impact into this question. Even if this is not your main purpose, the idea that you are proposing may help questioning the basis upon which those common assumptions about happiness are constructed in the popular culture, because according to it (and if I understood properly), instead of a matter of connection with the real world, or “present moment awareness”, what would be compromised during the occurrence of mind-wandering, would be a kind of self-awareness, possibly indicating that the anxiety that some people experiment when it happens, comes from the disruption in the continuity of the self, or from not being comfortable with the incoherent nature of random thoughts, or from somewhere else entirely, which is great because it questions directly the idea that it comes from the inability to connect with the real world.
As I said on the beginning, we are living a revolution in the studies of the mind, which also comes with the imperative to procure a certain level of coherence between that experimental data and the theoretical work constructed around it (the times where we could simply sit on a desk, close our eyes, and try to solve the problems of the res cogitans, like Descartes did, seem to be long gone), and I find the idea that you are proposing, to be very consistent with what the data says about the occurrence phenomenon on the brain. I wish you good luck with your proposal, and I hope that it also helps to bring some coherence on the topic of mind-wandering, and its relationship with happiness and wellbeing.
References:
• Creative Thinking Project. (2014, October 8). What is happening in our brains when our minds wander? [video file]. Available on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLYm41mS1-o
• Killingsworth, M. A., & Gilbert, D. (2010). A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science, 33(6006), 932-932.
• The royal Institution. (2017, February 1). The Neuroscience of Consciousness – with Anil Seth. [video file]. Available on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRel1JKOEbI
• Ted (2018, April 18). How to tame your wandering mind – Amishi Jha. [video file]. Available on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQzvNIIMayo