Mind Wandering Explained Simply

This page is meant as a starter page for students who have just started looking into mind wandering.  I personally think that the Wikipedia page on mind wandering is a bit too high level for students who have never read about it before.

What is Mind Wandering? (Introduction)

Even this question is controversial.  A rough definition is that mind wandering is when a person is in a mental state like daydreaming, where thoughts are internally driven rather than responding directly to the outside world.  Researchers argue over exactly what does count as mind wandering, but some have linked mind wandering to terms like “zoning out” or “tuning out” the external world.

Why is Mind Wandering Important? (Fields of Study)

1. Researchers study mind wandering to understand consciousness.  At this moment, your brain is receiving information from many stimuli (e.g. the feeling of shoes or socks on your feet), yet you are only aware of a small percentage of these stimuli.  What you are aware of is called your conscious experience.  Interestingly, a lot of one’s conscious experience has nothing to do with the outside world.  Much of what we think is generated internally by your imagination.  Researchers who study consciousness want to understand how the train of thought inside your awareness operates: how it is controlled, and what are the consequences of the strange process of grabbing onto one thought, and then jumping to a completely different kind of thought.  Consciousness has been described as being like a bird that flies, perches on a branch, and then flies off to another branch. As mind wandering is a fundamental feature of this jumping, researchers study mind wandering to understand more about consciousness.
2. Researchers study mind wandering to help prevent accidents.  Most accidents, particularly in the workplace, include some element of human failure that contributes to, or completely causes, the accident.  Examples of accidents include airplane crashes, trucking crashes, errors in medical handovers or drug prescribing, control room errors, errors for workers in emergency services, etc.  Often these errors are attributed to a lapse or complete break in attention, e.g. someone is not watching where they are driving.  These breaks in attention seem to be either a failure to be able to keep paying attention, or boredom and unwillingness to stay focused (even if that unwillingness is only subconscious).  It is well established that mind wandering is associated with higher rates of errors in psychology experiments.  The limits on one’s ability to pay attention are a facet of applied psychology.  Sometimes the field of limits to human psychological performance at work is called human factors, and in other cases it falls into safety studies or cognitive ergonomics.
3. Creativity research considers mind wandering a potential source of creative problem solving.
4. Psychiatric pathologies often seem to relate to elements of mind wandering.  For example, patients who are suffering from depression often have ruminative thoughts, in which their conscious thinking retraces the same negative thoughts repeatedly.  Because these ruminative thoughts are internally generated, it is possible that understanding mind wandering will help us understand more about the depressive pathology, or maybe the opposite: that understanding depression with its pathological train of thought may help us to understand mind wandering.  For this reason, there is an entire literature on whether mind wandering makes you happy, unhappy, or it depends.
5. Neuro-divergent people with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) have consistent problems with maintaining attention to certain tasks and social situations.  These issues with inattention have been proposed to relate to mind wandering, although other conscious phenomena such as “mind blanking” may be at play.
6. Some people seem to mind wander more than others.  This seems to be a function of the individual structures of their brains.  By the same token, the structure of the brain probably influences personality.  Because brain structure may influence both mind wandering AND brain structure, maybe there are links between the two. Accordingly, personality researchers are interested whether (and how) two of the “big five” personality traits seem to be related to mind wandering: low levels of conscientiousness (e.g. impulsivity) and high levels of “openness to new experiences” (i.e. creative and artistic sensitivity).
7. Functional brain imaging (especially fMRI) had to become very concerned with mind wandering.  This is because functional brain scanning always measures relative brain activity; there is no way to compare my brain activity directly to yours (except by making many adjustment calculations) because my brain is a different size than yours, our total blood flow in the brain will be different, etc..  The way brain scanning research calibrates for different brain sizes/shapes and different circulatory systems is to compare each person to themselves.  If a researcher wants to know what regions in the brain are active during a mathematical calculation, you compare that person’s raw brain activity measures from when they are doing the calculations to that same person’s raw brain activity measure when they are doing “nothing” (the control measurement).  After years of making such functional brain scanning measurements, researchers realised that people in a brain scanner are rarely thinking of “nothing”.  When people are in a brain scanner and asked to remain inactive, they often think about “nothing in particular”, i.e. they start to mind wander.  Thus, many brain scanning experiments are comparing people’s specific mental activities to their mind wandering.  We now know that mind wandering does activate some specific regions in the brain (some are referred to as the Default Mode Network).  This means that a lot of old brain scanning studies may have some mind wandering issues baked into the data.

How do you find out more about mind wandering (Researchers)

Mind wandering is a research topic, so in theory you would read research papers.  It used to be that there were not so many papers on mind wandering out there, but nowadays, there are a lot.  Where do you start?  Well, if you know what part of mind wandering you want to study, plug your search term in with “mind wandering” (include the quotation marks) and you may find what you are looking for.  Then again, you may be overwhelmed with stuff.

I suggest you start by learning the names and a few papers from the prolific authors who have written loads on the topic.  Here are some:

• Jonathan Smallwood: he coined the term mind wandering (in a review in 2006) and wrote a key paper in 2004.  These are not the first papers in mind wandering, but previous papers called the phenomenon by several different names.  Jonny Smallwood often approaches mind wandering from the point of view of thought content, and he often published with Jonathan Schooler. Video: https://youtu.be/BGYqi6dpRS8
• Paul Seli: he approaches mind wandering from a psychological perspective, and he developed the dichotomy between intentional and unintentional mind wandering. Video: https://youtu.be/xiRTIgIuWrg
• Kalina Christoff: She approaches mind wandering from a neuroscience and brain scanning perspective.  Her view of mind wandering is more strictly defined, and her vision of mind wandering relates to how fast your mind jumps from thought to thought. Video: https://youtu.be/UKGzWX342tU
• Michael Kane: He is interested in the fine structure of how attention is mediated by a limited collection of attentional resources in the mind.  His early essential papers were often published with Jennifer McVay.
• Dan Smilek: one of the original members of the University of Waterloo (Canada) mind wandering team, he focuses on how mind wandering affects you. Video: https://youtu.be/e4W9bA86fn0
• William Helton: he is interested in how attentional resources maintain sustained vigilance from a psychological and human factors point of view.

So what is mind wandering really? (Definition)

Although mind wandering does not have one clear definition, it has several potential properties.  Some researchers focus on one property, other researchers highlight a different one.  Some researchers have claimed that mind wandering is a family of different states that share some properties, where moments that satisfy all of these properties are the most central examples of mind wandering, whereas states that satisfy a few of them are still mind wandering, but a more peripheral form of mind wandering.  Here are the properties:

• Thoughts are not on the planned task
• Thoughts are not relating to external stimuli; they are internally driven
• Thoughts are meandering or drifting between topics or thoughts
• Thoughts are not guided to particular content
• No awareness or meta-awareness of the drifting of thoughts
• Thoughts have drifted away unintentionally

Kalina Christoff tends to focus on the meandering of thoughts.  Jonny Smallwood is more interested in the content of internally driven thoughts.  Paul Seli is most interested in thoughts that are off-task, and whether they have drifted away unintentionally.