Sometimes the mind wanders. Thoughts pop into consciousness. Ideas or images are present when just a moment before they were not. Scientists recently have been turning their attention to making sense of this.
One natural picture of the phenomenon goes something like this. Typically, our thoughts and feelings are shaped by what we are doing, by what there is around us. The world captures our attention and compels our minds this way or that. What explains the fact that you think of a red car when there is a red car in front of you is, well, the red car. And similarly, it is that loud noise that causes you to orient yourself to the commotion that is producing it. In such cases, we might say, the mind is coupled to the world around it and the world, in a way, plays us the way a person might play a piano.
Sarah Tronco, LCSW, practices Online Counseling New Jersey and works to develop a strong therapeutic relationship with her clients, which helps to create a secure place where individuals can achieve meaningful change.
But sometimes, even without going to sleep, we turn away from the world. We turn inward. We are contemplative or detached. We decouple ourselves from the environment and we are set free, as it were, to let our minds play themselves. To read more from ALVA NOË, click here.
Mind-wandering (sometimes referred to as task unrelated thought, or, colloquially, autopilot) is the experience of thoughts not remaining on a single topic for a long period of time, particularly when people are engaged in an attention-demanding task.[1]
Mind-wandering tends to occur during driving, reading and other activities where vigilance may be low[citation needed]. In these situations, people do not remember what happened in the surrounding environment because they are preoccupied with their thoughts. This is known as the decoupling hypothesis.[2] Studies using event-related potentials (ERPs) have quantified the extent that mind-wandering reduces the cortical processing of the external environment. When thoughts are unrelated to the task at hand, the brain processes both task-relevant and unrelated sensory information in a less detailed manner.[3][4][5]
Mind-wandering appears to be a stable trait of people and a transient state. Studies have linked performance problems in the laboratory[6] and in daily life.[7] Mind-wandering has been associated with possible car accidents.[8] Mind-wandering is also intimately linked to states of affect. Studies indicate that task-unrelated thoughts are common in people with low or depressed mood.[9][10] Mind-wandering also occurs when a person is intoxicated via the consumption of alcohol.[11]
Studies have demonstrated a prospective bias to spontaneous thought because individuals tend to engage in more future than past related thoughts during mind-wandering.[12] The default mode network is thought to be involved in mind-wandering and internally directed thought,[13] although recent work has challenged this assumption.[14]
History
The history of mind-wandering research dates back to 18th century England. British philosophers struggled to determine whether mind-wandering occurred in the mind or if an outside source caused it. In 1921, Varendonck published The Psychology of Day-Dreams, in which he traced his “‘trains of thoughts’ to identify their origins, most often irrelevant external influences”.[15][page needed] Wallas (1926) considered mind-wandering as an important aspect of his second stage of creative thought – incubation.[16][page needed] It wasn’t until the 1960s that the first documented studies were conducted on mind-wandering.[17] John Antrobus and Jerome L. Singer developed a questionnaire and discussed the experience of mind-wandering.[18] This questionnaire, known as the Imaginal Processes Inventory (IPI), provides a trait measure of mind-wandering and it assesses the experience on three dimensions: how vivid the person’s thoughts are, how many of those thoughts are guilt- or fear-based, and how deep into the thought a person goes. As technology continues to develop, psychologists are starting to use functional magnetic resonance imaging to observe mind-wandering in the brain and reduce psychologists’ reliance on verbal reports.[17]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind-wandering