3 Reasons You Want Your Mind To Wander
Feeling
unfocused? You need not be flummoxed, says science.
Are
your mental meanderings a must-have feature of your cranial life or a bug in
your skull system?
Peter
Killeen, the psychologist who explained to us the neurophysiological
step-by-step to mental wandering, asked as much in a recent paper.
We
tend to hold a wandering mind as a silly, if not bad thing, long-associated
with creative types: Thales, the pre-Socratic
philosopher, is said to have to been "so
eager to know what was going on in heaven that he could not see what was before
his feet" and had a habit of falling into wells. Any super thinky
people you know have probably done the same.
Meandering
has maladaptive connotations. A widely cited study by Harvard psychologists
Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert found that folks are "less happy
when they're mind-wandering no matter what they're doing." For instance,
if you're commuting to work, you'll feel better if you're focused on the slog
at hand rather than letting your mind get lost.
But
new research shows that wandering can also be adaptive to our
hyper-busy, hyper-social lives because, as the study says, "not all minds that wander are lost:
the importance of a balanced perspective on the mind-wandering state."
The
paper, authored by Jonathan Smallwood of the Max Planck Institute of Human
Cognitive Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany, and Jessica Andrews-Hanna of the
The Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Colorado combines the
assembled knowledge on mental wandering.
They
found that yes, mental wandering--which they term as the much more stately
self-generated thought--may lead to negative experiences, but that depends on
the content of the thought. As in, if your mind begins to wander in the form of
depressive ruminations--thinking of the ways that fate has vexed, hexed, and
jilted you--then the user experience of your commute is
probably going to get worse.
But
wandering need not be grump-inducingly destructive; if you're good at
it, self-generated thought can be life-affirmingly constructive. Here's
how:
Evolutionary
psychologists have found that hindsight and
foresight--what you might call mental time travel--are unique to humans.
Looking back on our experiences allows us to integrate them into our present
time, allowing us to act with a little more wisdom. Additionally,
self-generated thought allows us to consolidate our memories into a sense of
self.
This
is a pretty awesome survival technique: if you can anticipate what the future
will be like, you can align your present actions to it, whether you're planning
to kill a mammoth or build a career.
Psychologists
call the time between when you're presented with a complex problem and you
arrive at its solution as incubation, which is cute and illustrative.
Research has shown that if you're working on a simple task--something like brushing
your teeth--letting your mind wander allows for connections to arise. But if
you're doing something complicated--like driving down a busy road--you'd best
pay attention.
The lesson, then, is to have a sense
of meta-mindfulness: If we're doing something simple, we can let our
minds wander. But if the task at hand is complex, we might fall into a well.
http://www.fastcompany.com/3016505/leadership-now/3-reasons-you-want-your-mind-to-wander?partner=newsletter
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