Stop Paying Attention: Zoning Out Is a Crucial Mental State
Very interesting article from Discover about distractedness…
I am going to do my best to hold your attention until the very last word of this column. Actually, I know it’s futile. Along the way, your mind will wander off, then return, then drift away again. But I can console myself with some recent research on the subject of mind wandering. Mind wandering is not necessarily the sign of a boring column. It’s just one of the things that make us human.
Everybody knows what it is like for our minds to wander, and yet, for a long time psychologists shied away from examining the experience. It seemed too elusive and subjective to study scientifically. Only in the past decade have they even measured just how common mind wandering is. The answer is very.
Some of the most striking evidence comes from Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara who is one of the leading researchers on mind wandering. In 2005 he and his colleagues told a group of undergraduates to read the opening chapters of War and Peace on a computer monitor and then to tap a key whenever they realized they were not thinking about what they were reading. On average, the students reported that their minds wandered 5.4 times in a 45-minute session. Other researchers have gotten similar results with simpler tasks, such as pronouncing words or pressing a button in response to seeing particular letters and numbers. Depending on the experiment, people spend up to half their time not thinking about the task at hand—even when they’ve been told explicitly to pay attention.
3 Responses to “Stop Paying Attention: Zoning Out Is a Crucial Mental State”
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Published: Jun 26 2009
Really interesting. I’m curious about your feelings about this article. ln my quest to struggle to be mindful I’ve made mind wandering an enemy, only later to read that mind wandering is good for you! In my meditation this morning after reading this, I thought of these two modes of brain function being similar to riding a bicycle — with mindfulness being the cranking of the gears and wandering being coasting. What do you think about that? How do you deal with your wandering mind? Do you get frustrated in your attempts to be mindful like I do?
Hi Geoff,
I think that daydreaming can be creative. Sometimes I let myself daydream in meditation. There’s some kind of mindfulness still operating, which makes it different from pure distraction (and which means that I don’t quite see things in the same terms as your cycling metaphor). The times I let myself daydream are if I’m going to be teaching or writing, and in the relaxed state of meditation some good ideas come bubbling up. I’ll find myself hearing (in my head) a talk I’m about to give, and I’ll let the talk run so that those ideas fully emerge.
I do also sometimes just get distracted, but I very rarely get frustrated about this. Distraction just happens — the thing is to notice it when you can, and to let go of it. Getting distracted is no big deal.
Ok that makes sense. So, I tell you once I said to my mind, “mind, you are free to roam” it was really nice. I have been striving so hard to just have tea when I have tea or just eat cereal while eating cereal… really trying to be mindful of the moment and not get distracted. I was trying to hard. So it’s been really liberating for me when I find my mind wandering to say “there is wandering” without judgement. Thanks for the response!