A few years ago, a study by Daniel Gilbert and Matthew Killingsworth made headlines—at least in the cognitive neuroscience world—by reporting two findings. One is that people tend to zone out nearly 50% of the time. The other is that “a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.”
It should be noted that Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist, specializes in affective forecasting—the ability to predict how people will feel in the future. He is the author of Stumbling on Happiness, which demonstrates that we actually have no idea how we’ll feel in the future, in spite of our firm convictions to the contrary.
Gilbert, then, is interested in studying what makes us happy. His research with Killingsworth consisted of interrupting people multiple times a day to ask them what they were doing and how happy they were when they were doing it. One of the things people reported being unhappy about was mind-wandering. (They reported being happiest when they were making love, exercising, or engaging in conversation.)
It seems that the most consistent response to this study, immediately following expressions of dismay, has been to try to get us to be more “in the moment”—in other words, to practice mindfulness. I’m a big fan of mindfulness, but I think there’s more to mind-wandering than whether or not it makes us happy. As I wrote about in an earlier post, people who pursue meaning in their lives rather than happiness aren’t necessarily happy, either. But they report being more satisfied.
As it turns out there are a few benefits associated with mind-wandering. One is that we can mentally escape from boring or unpleasant tasks or situations. An extreme example of mental escape was described by Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning as to how some prisoners in the concentration camps were able to survive better than others:
Sensitive people who were used to a rich intellectual life may have suffered much pain (they were often of a delicate constitution), but the damage to their inner selves was less. They were able to retreat from their terrible surroundings to a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom. Only in this way can one explain the apparent paradox that some prisoners of a less hardy make-up often seemed to survive camp life better than did those of a robust nature. …
The intensification of inner life helped the prisoner find a refuge from the emptiness, desolation and spiritual poverty of his existence, by letting him escape into the past. When given free rein, his imagination played with past events, often not important ones, but minor happenings and trifling things. His nostalgic memory glorified them and they assumed a strange character….
As the inner life of the prisoner tended to become more intense, he also experienced the beauty of art and nature as never before. Under their influence he sometimes even forgot his own frightful circumstances.
Another benefit of mind-wandering is increased creativity. Neuroscientists have determined that our brains have a “default network” that is activated when our minds are free to wander. When our attention is focused on a task, on the other hand, our executive network is activated to oversee the operation. But sometimes when our minds are wandering both of these networks are active. Jonathan Schooler and Jonathan Smallwood, both of UC Santa Barbara, theorize that both networks are working on agendas beyond the immediate task—which could explain why people whose minds wander score higher on tests of creativity.
Eric Klinger, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota believes mind wandering “serves as a kind of reminder mechanism, thereby increasing the likelihood that other goal pursuits will remain intact and not get lost in the shuffle of pursuing many goals.” According to Dr. Klinger, our mind wandering gives us an evolutionary advantage.
So we probably shouldn’t rush to judgment and try to stop our minds from wandering in an attempt to make ourselves happier. Nor should we give our minds free rein to wander at will. Mind-wandering is something to be aware of. To appreciate. And to curb when it’s more appropriate to focus on the task at hand.
It isn’t as if we could put an end to our mind-wandering, anyway. We just need to learn when to go with the flow and when to direct the flow, which may be one more thing that is easier said than done.
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