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While most psychologists call mind wandering a detrimental “failure of executive control,” a new study led by Paul Seli suggests that it’s not always harmful.

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When wandering minds are just fine

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The practice has no detrimental effects in some situations, study says

It’s a common experience for most students. You’re sitting in a lecture that covers material you already know, and before long your mind drifts and you become occupied with thoughts of what you’ll do over the weekend, or what you should make for dinner, or whether you should ask out the person sitting in the front row.

While most of the psychological literature has painted such mind wandering as a detrimental “failure of executive control” or a “dysfunctional cognitive state,” a new study led by Paul Seli, a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow working in the lab of Dan Schacter, suggests that in some cases there’s no harm in allowing the mind to wander.

The first-of-its-kind study showed that, when performing a task that didn’t demand constant attention, people were able to strategically allow their minds to wander without an impact on task performance. The study is described in a paper published in Psychological Science .

“To date, the vast majority of tasks used in the literature on mind wandering have been very attentionally demanding,” Seli said. “The problem is that, if people want to perform well on such tasks, they’re required to constantly focus their attention … because they can’t predict when there’s going to be a critical event or a target to which they have to respond.”

As an example, Seli cited studies that have used a now-common sustained-attention task for which the participants had to press a button each time they saw certain numbers on a screen (like the digits 1‒2 and 4‒9) and to withhold responding to a target digit (say, the digit 3).

“Because the series of digits is randomly presented, people don’t know when the 3 is going to be presented,” he said. “So if they want to perform well on the task, they must constantly pay attention to all the digits, because any one of them could be a target.

“But as I thought about this, it occurred to me that many of the tasks we perform in daily life are quite different from these sorts of tasks, since they don’t constantly demand our attention.” He continued, “For instance, I can be in the midst of writing an email, then take a mind-wandering break, then return to the email without impairing the quality of that email. Or I can ride my bike to the grocery store without having to constantly think about navigating my way there.”

To explore whether it was possible for people to mind wander strategically, Seli designed a new kind of task for participants.

“What they see is an analog clock face with a hand that ticks once every second and makes a full revolution around the clock’s face every 20 seconds,” he said. “Their task is to press the spacebar when the hand is pointed at 12 o’clock. Our hypothesis was that, after each critical event [when the hand was pointed at 12 o’clock] participants would realize that they didn’t need to be focused on the task for another 20 or so seconds, so they should strategically increase their rates of mind wandering, since they could afford to do so without incurring any performance costs.”

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Minding the details of mind wandering

To assess participants’ rates of mind wandering throughout the clock task, Seli and colleagues intermittently presented “thought probes,” which are questions that interrupt the task, and asked participants if they were focused on the task or engaged in mind wandering. To determine whether people did strategically mind wander, the researchers divided the clock’s face into quadrants and examined rates of mind wandering caught by probes in each quadrant.

In the first quadrant, which covered the five-second period following each critical event, they found that participants reported mind wandering about 33 percent of the time. Over the second and third quadrants, which covered the next 10 seconds, participants’ focus on the task waned, and they reported mind wandering about half the time. But as the clock hand began to finish its revolution, participants returned their attention to the task, and their reports of mind wandering dropped.

“Participants realized that, after each critical event, they could increase their rates of mind wandering without hurting their performance, since the next critical event wouldn’t occur for some time” Seli said. “But as the next critical event became more imminent, they prepared for this event by re-engaging their attention with the task. In other words, they strategically copped a daydream when they could afford to do so.”

What’s more is that in analyzing participants’ accuracy on the clock task, how much their minds wandered did not affect how well they performed on the task, although Seli and colleagues found variation in how much or little people mind wandered throughout the task.

“Whether a person mind wandered 90 percent of the time or 10 percent of the time didn’t seem to matter,” Seli said. “Mind wandering wasn’t associated with any detectable performance costs. That is, people who frequently mind wandered performed just as well as those who infrequently mind wandered.”

While the study offers evidence that people can, in fact, strategically mind wander without incurring costs, Seli said it also raises interesting questions about how universal that ability may be.

“One broad question I’m interested in exploring is whether people differ in their ability to strategically modulate their mind wandering,” he said. “For instance, an open question is whether older adults are capable of this more calculated type of mind wandering. And what about people with relatively low levels of cognitive control, such as those with low working-memory capacities, or those suffering from attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder?”

Ultimately, Seli said, the study points to the need for context when it comes to understanding and evaluating the risks associated with mind wandering.

“If you’re completing a task that affords you the opportunity to mind wander, like writing an email or riding a bicycle … then mind wandering is likely not going to hurt your performance, and it may even be functional insofar as it might allow you to engage in beneficial processes such as problem-solving or creative thinking,” he said. “But there are certainly some attentionally demanding tasks, like those performed by air-traffic controllers or train operators, for which we don’t want to be advising people to just go ahead and mind wander.

“The vast majority of research has painted a rather bleak picture of mind wandering because much of this research has used tasks that constantly demand people’s attention.” He continued, “Of course, if people are completing a task that constantly demands their attention, then by definition mind wandering during that task is going to hurt their performance. And this is a finding that we’ve seen time and time again in the literature.

“But the problem, I think, is that the deck has been stacked against mind wandering. The common finding that mind wandering is a detrimental state appears to be an artifact of the attentionally demanding tasks we’ve been using. So there remains the possibility that, at least during certain tasks that afford people the opportunity to mind wander strategically, engaging in such mind wandering may be quite functional. And since we know that people spend a considerable portion of their lives engaged in mind wandering, such a finding would be very welcomed silver lining.”

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Mind is a frequent, but not happy, wanderer: People spend nearly half their waking hours thinking about what isn’t going on around them

People spend 46.9 percent of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they're doing, and this mind-wandering typically makes them unhappy. So says a study that used an iPhone web app to gather 250,000 data points on subjects' thoughts, feelings, and actions as they went about their lives.

The research, by psychologists Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert of Harvard University, is described in the journal Science .

"A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind," Killingsworth and Gilbert write. "The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost."

Unlike other animals, humans spend a lot of time thinking about what isn't going on around them: contemplating events that happened in the past, might happen in the future, or may never happen at all. Indeed, mind-wandering appears to be the human brain's default mode of operation.

To track this behavior, Killingsworth developed an iPhone web app that contacted 2,250 volunteers at random intervals to ask how happy they were, what they were currently doing, and whether they were thinking about their current activity or about something else that was pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant.

Subjects could choose from 22 general activities, such as walking, eating, shopping, and watching television. On average, respondents reported that their minds were wandering 46.9 percent of time, and no less than 30 percent of the time during every activity except making love.

"Mind-wandering appears ubiquitous across all activities," says Killingsworth, a doctoral student in psychology at Harvard. "This study shows that our mental lives are pervaded, to a remarkable degree, by the non-present."

Killingsworth and Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, found that people were happiest when making love, exercising, or engaging in conversation. They were least happy when resting, working, or using a home computer.

"Mind-wandering is an excellent predictor of people's happiness," Killingsworth says. "In fact, how often our minds leave the present and where they tend to go is a better predictor of our happiness than the activities in which we are engaged."

The researchers estimated that only 4.6 percent of a person's happiness in a given moment was attributable to the specific activity he or she was doing, whereas a person's mind-wandering status accounted for about 10.8 percent of his or her happiness.

Time-lag analyses conducted by the researchers suggested that their subjects' mind-wandering was generally the cause, not the consequence, of their unhappiness.

"Many philosophical and religious traditions teach that happiness is to be found by living in the moment, and practitioners are trained to resist mind wandering and to 'be here now,'" Killingsworth and Gilbert note in Science. "These traditions suggest that a wandering mind is an unhappy mind."

This new research, the authors say, suggests that these traditions are right.

Killingsworth and Gilbert's 2,250 subjects in this study ranged in age from 18 to 88, representing a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds and occupations. Seventy-four percent of study participants were American.

More than 5,000 people are now using the iPhone web app the researchers have developed to study happiness, which can be found at www.trackyourhappiness.org .

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Materials provided by Harvard University . Original written by Steve Bradt, Harvard Staff Writer. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference :

• Matthew A. Killingsworth, Daniel T. Gilbert. A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind . Science , 2010; 330 (6006): 932 DOI: 10.1126/science.1192439

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November 24, 2010

A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy One

New research underlines the wisdom of being absorbed in what you do

By Jason Castro

We spend billions of dollars each year looking for happiness, hoping it might be bought, consumed, found, or flown to. Other, more contemplative cultures and traditions assure us that this is a waste of time (not to mention money). ‘Be present’ they urge. Live in the moment, and there you’ll find true contentment.

Sure enough, our most fulfilling experiences are typically those that engage us body and mind, and are unsullied by worry or regret. In these cases, a relationship between focus and happiness is easy to spot. But does this relationship hold in general, even for simple, everyday activities? Is a focused mind a happy mind? Harvard psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert decided to find out.

In a recent study published in Science, Killingsworth and Gilbert discovered that an unnervingly large fraction of our thoughts - almost half - are not related to what we’re doing. Surprisingly, we tended to be elsewhere even for casual and presumably enjoyable activities, like watching TV or having a conversation. While you might hope all this mental wandering is taking us to happier places, the data say otherwise. Just like the wise traditions teach, we’re happiest when thought and action are aligned, even if they’re only aligned to wash dishes.

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The ingredients of simple, everyday happiness are tough to study in the lab, and aren’t easily measured with a standard experimental battery of forced choices, eye-tracking, and questionnaires. Day to day happiness is simply too fleeting. To really study it’s causes, you need to catch people in the act of feeling good or feeling bad in real-world settings.

To do this, the researchers used a somewhat unconventional, but powerful, technique known as experience sampling. The idea behind it is simple. Interrupt people at unpredictable intervals and ask them what they’re doing, and what’s on their minds. If you do this many times a day for many days, you can start to assemble a kind of quantitative existential portrait of someone. Do this for many people, and you can find larger patterns and tendencies in human thought and behavior, allowing you to correlate moments of happiness with particular kinds of thought and action.

To sample our inner lives, the team developed an iPhone app that periodically surveyed people’s thoughts and activities. At random times throughout the day, a participant’s iPhone would chime, and present him with a brief questionnaire that asked how happy he was (on a scale from 1-100), what he was doing, and if he was thinking about what he was doing. If subjects were indeed thinking of something else, they reported whether that something else was pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant. Responses to the questions were standardized, which allowed them to be neatly summarized in a database that tracked the collective moods, actions, and musings of about 5000 total participants (a subset of 2250 people was used in the present study).

In addition to awakening us to just how much our minds wander, the study clearly showed that we’re happiest when thinking about what we’re doing. Although imagining pleasant alternatives was naturally preferable to imagining unpleasant ones, the happiest scenario was to not be imagining at all. A person who is ironing a shirt and thinking about ironing is happier than a person who is ironing and thinking about a sunny getaway.

What about the kinds of activities we do, though? Surely, the hard-partiers and world travelers among us are happier than the quiet ones who stay at home and tuck in early? Not necessarily. According to the data from the Harvard group’s study, the particular way you spend your day doesn’t tell much about how happy you are. Mental presence - the matching of thought to action - is a much better predictor of happiness.

The happy upshot of this study is that it suggests a wonderfully simple prescription for greater happiness: think about what you’re doing. But be warned that like any prescription, following it is very different from just knowing it’s good for you. In addition to the usual difficulties of breaking bad or unhelpful habits, your brain may also be wired to work against your attempts stay present.

Recent fMRI scanning studies show that even when we’re quietly at rest and following instructions to think of nothing in particular, our brains settle into a conspicuous pattern of activity that corresponds to mind-wandering. This signature ‘resting’ activity is coordinated across several widespread brain areas , and is argued by many to be evidence of a brain network that is active by default. Under this view our brains climb out of the default state when we’re bombarded with input, or facing a challenging task, but tend to slide back into it once things quiet down.

Why are our brains so intent on tuning out? One possibility is that they’re calibrated for a target level of arousal. If a task is dull and can basically be done on autopilot, the brain conjures up its own exciting alternatives and sends us off and wandering. This view is somewhat at odds with the Killingsworth and Gilbert’s findings though, since subjects wandered even on ‘engaging’ activities. Another, more speculative possibility is that wandering corresponds to some important mental housekeeping or regulatory process that we’re not conscious of. Perhaps while we check out, disparate bits of memory and experience are stitched together into a coherent narrative – our sense of self.

Of course, it’s also possible that wandering isn’t really ‘for’ anything, but rather just a byproduct of a brain in a world that doesn’t punish the occasional (or even frequent) flight of fancy. Regardless of what prompts our brains to settle into the default mode, its tendency to do so may be the kiss of death for happiness. As the authors of the paper elegantly summarize their work: “a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.” 

On the plus side, a mind can be trained to wander less. With regular and dedicated meditation practice, you can certainly become much more present, mindful, and content. But you’d better be ready to work. The most dramatic benefits only really accrue for individuals, often monks, who have clocked many thousands of hours practicing the necessary skills (it’s not called the default state for nothing).

The next steps in this work will be fascinating to see, and we can certainly expect to see more results from the large data set collected by Killingsworth and Gilbert. It will be interesting to know, for example, how much people vary in their tendency to wander, and whether differences in wandering are associated with psychiatric ailments. If so, we may be able to tailor therapeutic interventions for people prone to certain cognitive styles that put them at risk for depression, anxiety, or other disorders.

In addition to the translational potential of this work, it will also be exciting to understand the brain networks responsible for wandering, and whether there are trigger events that send the mind into the wandering or focused state. Though wandering may be bad for happiness, it is still fascinating to wonder why we do it.

Are you a scientist? Have you recently read a peer-reviewed paper that you want to write about? Then contact Mind Matters co-editor Gareth Cook, a Pulitzer prize -winning journalist at the Boston Globe, where he edits the Sunday Ideas section. He can be reached at garethideas AT gmail.com

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• Published: 11 May 2022

On the relationship between mind wandering and mindfulness

• Angelo Belardi 1 ,
• Leila Chaieb 2 ,
• Alodie Rey-Mermet 1 ,
• Florian Mormann 2 ,
• Nicolas Rothen 1 ,
• Juergen Fell 2 &
• Thomas P. Reber 1 , 2  

Scientific Reports volume  12 , Article number:  7755 ( 2022 ) Cite this article

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Mind wandering (MW) and mindfulness have both been reported to be vital moderators of psychological wellbeing. Here, we aim to examine how closely associated these phenomena are and evaluate the psychometrics of measures often used to quantify them. We investigated two samples, one consisting of German-speaking unpaid participants (GUP, n \(=\) 313) and one of English-speaking paid participants (EPP, n \(=\) 228) recruited through MTurk.com. In an online experiment, we collected data using the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS) and the sustained attention to response task (SART) during which self-reports of MW and meta-awareness of MW were recorded using experience sampling (ES) probes. Internal consistency of the MAAS was high (Cronbachs \(\alpha\) of 0.96 in EPP and 0.88 in GUP). Split-half reliability for SART measures and self-reported MW was overall good with the exception of SART measures focusing on Nogo trials, and those restricted to SART trials preceding ES in a 10 s time window. We found a moderate negative association between trait mindfulness and MW as measured with ES probes in GUP, but not in EPP. Our results suggest that MW and mindfulness are on opposite sides of a spectrum of how attention is focused on the present moment and the task at hand.

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Introduction.

Waking experience can be described as a stream of thoughts, perceptions, and emotions that come in and out of the focus of our conscious awareness. Mind wandering (MW) refers to our thoughts becoming decoupled from an ongoing task and coupled to thoughts and feelings not being subject to the task at hand or our surroundings 1 . In comparison, mindfulness refers to the mental act of intentionally resting the focus of awareness on a particular subject of experience in the present moment without judgment 2 . These constructs appear to emphasise aspects which lie on opposite sides of a spectrum of how intentional, focused, and self-aware one is regarding the thoughts and perceptions that make up one’s conscious experience 3 .

In light of these conceptual considerations, it seems surprising that statistical associations between measures of MW and mindfulness are rather low 3 , 4 , 5 . One possible explanation for this may be the low reliability of the psychometric tools used to measure these constructs. Another possibility could be that meta-awareness of MW 6 , 7 , i.e., awareness of the fact that ones contents of consciousness is decoupling from an ongoing task, moderates the relationship between mindfulness and MW. To investigate these questions, we first assessed the psychometrics of a well-established mindfulness questionnaire and self-report measures of MW and meta-awareness thereof in a large sample from an online study. Then we estimated the associations between measures of MW, mindfulness, and meta-awareness.

Evidence for the importance of both MW and mindfulness for psychological wellbeing has been reported numerous times in the literature. Increased propensity to MW was associated with reduced affect 8 and in its extreme form MW can result in persistent negative and repetitive thoughts leading to rumination. Such rumination is at the heart of neurocognitive models of depression 9 , 10 , 11 . Furthermore, distraction due to MW can potentially cause physical harm e.g. when driving 12 , operating heavy machinery 13 , or when working as a medical professional 14 . Excessive MW may also interfere with career goals by affecting work and educational performance 15 . While a majority of studies focus on negative consequences, MW may also facilitate future planning, goal setting, and aid creative problem solving 16 , 17 , 18 . For example, Medea and colleagues 18 found that self-generated cognition during an episode of MW may allow the development of more concrete personal goals.

In contrast, mindfulness has been associated predominantly with an increased feeling of wellbeing. The concept of mindfulness has its origins in eastern philosophy and is closely linked to processes of awareness and attention. Mindfulness describes a state in which a person willingly chooses the focus of conscious experience and takes constant notice of their contents of consciousness. Practicing to achieve this mindful state has been a central tenet of traditional Buddhist meditation, and has been introduced in western cultures as a secular form of mental practice and flavours in psychotherapy, such as e.g., the mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) program or acceptance and commitment therapy 2 , 19 , 20 .

A widely used task to experimentally elicit MW is the sustained attention to response task (SART) 21 . Participants view, for example, a stream of numbers from 0 to 9 appearing in a random sequence and at a constant rate. The participants’ task is to press a button in response to all non-target digits (Go trials) except for one – the target, where they are required to withhold their button press (i.e., the Nogo trial, such as the number 7). Several dependent variables have been used in the SART, such as the performance of the task (i.e., the error rate on Go trials and Nogo trials), the mean reaction time (RT) in Go trials and the variance of these RTs, as well as scores combining performance and RT (e.g. a skills index, calculated as accuracy/RT) 22 . Variants of the task include querying participants intermittently in defined intervals as to whether their mind was ‘on task’ or ‘off task’ using experience sampling (ES) probes to measure MW. Furthermore, meta-awareness of MW is queried after ES of MW in some studies immediately after ‘off task’ responses 23 , 24 . In addition to the self-reports from ES, low performance 25 , 26 , 27 as well as long and widely dispersed RTs 16 in the SART are considered evidence for low sustained attention and potentially for MW. Several versions of the paradigm combining ES probes and SART have been used in previous research. For example, some studies restricted performance and RT analyses to short time windows immediately preceding appearance of the ES probe 16 , 27 . Other studies varied SART difficulty by either adding auditory noise 28 , by making the number stream predictable 29 , or by increasing the inter-stimulus interval (ISI) 30 . Taken together, there is a variety of ways in which the SART is used to elicit and assess MW.

Tools to measure mindfulness, on the other hand, consist predominantly of self-report questionnaires. One of the most commonly used questionnaires is the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS) 31 . Previous assessments of the MAAS found that it has a single factor structure and overall robust reliability (Cronbach’s \(\alpha\) between 0.8 and 0.87) 31 . External validity was evaluated with numerous questionnaires assessing a variety of related constructs such as everyday attention, personality traits and anxiety 31 , 32 . Because of the high importance of this questionnaire in mindfulness research, we explored the possibility of shorter versions of the MAAS, based on only 5 and 3 items, which would be quicker to implement in future research.

Despite the close conceptual relationship between MW and mindfulness, estimates of the strength of their association have been surprisingly low 3 , 4 , 5 . Furthermore, none of these previous studies reported an estimate of reliability for ES of MW, making the interpretation of this association difficult. See Table 1 for a detailed summary of previous findings. Together, there is only weak evidence to suggest that a direct measure of MW such as ES during the SART correlates with MAAS scores. Moreover, when these associations were reported, they were moderate at best.

Additional evidence for the relationship comes from a related line of research that investigates whether mindfulness training impacts direct and indirect measures of MW (for a review, see 33 ). Such intervention studies found that the practice of mindfulness usually improved SART performance 3 , 34 , 76 , 36 , 37 , 38 and reduced the frequency of self-reported MW in some cases 36 , 39 but not in others 34 , 38 . Moreover, one study reported higher MAAS scores after mindfulness training 35 . Similarly to the findings of those correlation studies reported before, in these mindfulness training studies the associations between the direct MW measure and mindfulness is not as strong as one might expect.

One possible explanation of low associations between ES of MW and MAAS scores could be that queryi ng participants for whether they were on or off task alone conflates over two forms of MW that are opposingly linked to mindfulness, namely MW with and without meta-awareness 6 . This hypothesis has been put forward by Smallwood and Schooler 7 , and initial empirical evidence for the importance of considering meta-awareness was gathered by the same authors in an ensuing study 9 . Here, ‘zone outs’ (MW without awareness) were linked to higher inhibition errors in an ongoing task while ‘tune outs’ (MW with awareness) were not. How these ‘zone out’ and ‘tune out’ propensities are linked to trait mindfulness, however, seems unclear in the previous literature. Deng et al. 4 found no significant relationship between either the ‘zone out’ or the ’tune out’ rate with trait mindfulness as measured by the MAAS. A more recent study 5 found both rates to be negatively associated with MAAS scores. Together there is inconsistent evidence on the role of meta-awareness as potential mediator between MW and trait mindfulness. Another possible explanation for low correlations between SART, ES, and MAAS is insufficient reliability of measures derived from these instruments. Reliability is an often overlooked quality metric in cognitive tasks while it is routinely reported for questionnaires 40 . Reliability estimates are important as they determine an upper limit of how large correlations between two measures can be. For all the individual measures for mindfulness and MW discussed above, robust psychometric properties have been reported before, though rarely combined and sometimes in small samples: MAAS 31 , 32 , specific SART measures with and without ES for MW 41 , 35 , 36 , 37 , 45 . Table 1 lists all referenced studies that measured the MAAS and/or the SART with or without ES of MW. The table depicts sample sizes, reliability estimates and estimates of association. Most importantly, this table shows that none of the previous studies employed all three measures (MAAS, SART, and ES of MW) and reported both, reliabilities of all measures as well as correlations between all of them. The present study aims to fill this gap and offers data from two new large samples.

Overall the aim of this study is to assess the psychometric quality of several measures for MW and mindfulness from the SART, MAAS, ES of MW and ES of meta-awareness. In a second step, we want to gain an estimate for the statistical association between these constructs. We combined ES of MW during the SART with an established measure of mindfulness in an online study in two large samples collected in an online experiment and by doing so add psychometric estimates for these measures gained in an online study and assessed together.

We recruited two samples of participants for a German and an English version of the experiment. In our first recruitment phase we targeted German-speaking participants through the participant pool of our institution, made up of students and volunteers from the public. Throughout the study, we refer to this sample as German-speaking unpaid participants (GUP). In a second phase, we recruited and paid participants predominantly through Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT, mturk.com) for an English version of the experiment. We refer to this sample as English-speaking paid participants (EPP). All participants first answered a questionnaire on demographics and the MAAS, then they performed a 20 min version of the SART during which ES probes of MW and meta-awareness wee obtained (see “ Methods ” section).

Sample differences

We initially planned to report our findings as one sample, since the online experiment was identical except for the language. However, after finding significant differences between our two samples in the SART and ES data, we decided post-hoc to report all findings separately for GUP and EPP (see Table 2 for sample differences between all main measures). Most strikingly, EPP reported significantly less than half as often to be ‘off task’ than the GUP \((\hbox {t}(519.01) = -10.06\) , p < .001, d \(=\) 0.81, \(M_E{}_P{}_P = 0.09\) , \(M_G{}_U{}_P = 0.25\) ). This indicates much lower variance in ES data in the EPP. There were also significant differences on all measures derived from the SART directly (RT, accuracy) albeit in a lower magnitude (see Table 2 ).

Factorial structure and reliability of the MAAS

We first checked the correlation matrices of the individual items on the questionnaire and the total score, separately for each of the two samples. In the GUP sample, item 6 had low item-to-total correlation (r \(=\) 0.05) and correlations below r \(=\) 0.2 with most other items. For that reason, we excluded item 6 from further analyses for the GUP. Thus, our total MAAS score for the EPP contained all 15 initial items, while the score of the GUP contained only 14 items.

We then conducted an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) for the MAAS responses for each of the two samples (factor loadings for one-factor EFAs are presented in Table 3 ). Figure 1 depicts scree plots for the EPP and GUP; these plots suggest that a single latent factor drives responses in the MAAS. Further EFAs also revealed that two-factor models only explain little additional variance (EPP: 3% and GUP: 5%), in comparison to that explained by one-factor models (EPP: 63% and GUP: 36%). However, the Kaiser rule (selecting the factors with an eigenvalue above 1; indicated by the dotted line in the scree plots) is also in accordance with a two-factor solution in our GUP.

The model fit statistics from confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) were estimated using the Comparative Fit Index (CFI), the Tucker Lewis Index (TLI), and the Root mean square error approximation (RMSEA). We compared the values against common standards for an acceptable fit (CFI/TLI > 0.9, RMSEA < 0.06) 52 . For one-factor models, the fits are acceptably high in the EPP (CFI \(=\) 0.954, TLI \(=\) 0.946). The fits were poorer, however, for the GUP (CFI \(=\) 0.858, TLI \(=\) 0.832). The RMSEA, which is an absolute fit statistic, indicates a poor approximate fit for both models, in the EPP (RMSEA \(=\) 0.08) and GUP (RMSEA \(=\) 0.096). However, the use of a fixed threshold for the RMSEA is questionable 53 , 54 . The full fit statistics of these two models and of an alternative two-factor model for the GUP can be found in the supplementary materials at https://osf.io/8kg6z . Together, EFA and CFA are mostly consistent with the notion of one single factor driving responses to the MAAS, even though some fit statistics for the CFA were below the threshold for an acceptable fit.

Reliabilities of the MAAS score (mean of individual items) were overall high. For the full MAAS the standardized Cronbach’s \(\alpha\) was 0.88 in the GUP sample and 0.96 in the EPP. We created and then investigated shorter versions of the questionnaire consisting of the three or five items with the highest loadings in the EFAs. In the EPP these items were 7, 8, 10, 1, 11, and in the GUP items 14, 8, 9, 10, 7, in order of decreasing loading (see also Table 3 ). We refer to these shortened scales as the MAAS-5 and MAAS-3. The Cronbach’s \(\alpha\) s of the scales are given in Table 4 and further descriptives of the scores are available in the supplementary materials (Table S7 ). Correlations between short and full MAAS scores were reasonably high (between r = 0.79 and r = 0.97, see full correlation matrices in the supplementary materials (Figs. S9 and S10 ).

Scree plot for MAAS for EPP and GUP samples. This figure was created using R (v. 4.02) 55 with package ‘ggplot2’ (v. 3.3.5) 56 .

Reliability of MW measures taken from the SART and ES

Estimates of reliability of the measures derived from the SART and ES probes are presented in Table 4 . They are split-half reliabilities derived using a permutation-based approach with 5000 random splits 40 , 57 . For further descriptives of the measures, see Table S7 in the supplementary materials. From the SART, we report these measures: accuracy, the mean (M) and standard deviation (SD) of RTs during all trials and also in only those trials preceding the ES probes within a 10-s time window, a measure used in MW neuroimaging studies 27 . SART values are reported separately for correct Go trials and incorrect Nogo trials. From ES probes, we report the proportion of all ES probes in which participants answered that they were off-task (Attention Off) and the proportion of meta-awareness probes in which participants answered that they were unaware that their attention was off task (Meta-Awareness Off). The sample sizes for the meta-awareness probes were smaller, because they exclude participants who reported that they were always on task. Split-half reliabilities for measures from Go trials in the SART and for ES probes are generally high. Reliabilities for Nogo trials were markedly lower, and were further reduced when restricting the analyses to the 10-s time windows immediately preceding ES probes. It is noteworthy that the sample sizes varied for these different measures due to the structure of the data and restrictions for the split-half calculations: Each participant needed at least four valid data points for the split-half procedure, as each split required two data points to calculate a mean or standard deviation. Furthermore, only 10.6% of all trials were Nogo trials and participants only reacted to 15.2% of Nogo trials, making Nogo trials with participant reaction somewhat scarce.

Estimates of association between the MAAS, SART, and ES

In a next step, we assessed the hypothesized negative association of MW with mindfulness. To this aim, we correlated measures derived from the SART and ES with the MAAS (Fig.  2 ). For the link between the direct measure of MW and mindfulness, we found ES probes (Attention Off) were moderately negatively associated with the MAAS in GUP ( \(\hbox {r} = -.29\) , \(p< 0.001\) ) but not in EPP (r \(=\) 0.04, \(p > 0.1\) ). Between indirect measures of MW and mindfulness, there was no indication for an association between the SART and the MAAS in GUP. In EPP, however, there were small correlations between MAAS total score and SD of RTs in the Go trials during the 10 s window before ES probes ( \(\hbox {r} = -.23\) , \(p < 0.05\) ), between MAAS total score and accuracy in all Nogo trials ( \(\hbox {r} = .13\) , \(p < 0.05\) ), and a medium association between MAAS total score and accuracy of Nogo trials in the 10 s window before ES probes ( \(\hbox {r} = -.43\) , \(p < 0.01\) ). The pattern is mostly consistent with the idea of a negative association of MW and mindfulness. There was no association between meta-awareness probes and MAAS scores in both samples. All pairwise correlations for both samples are available in Tables S1 and S2 in the supplementary materials at https://osf.io/8kg6z .

To check whether these correlations might have been heavily influenced by outliers or non-normally distributed data, we additionally bootstrapped the correlation coefficients and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for these pairwise correlations (1000 iterations, 100 random participants sampled in each). In addition, we compared the Pearson product-moment correlations to Spearman rank correlations. These analyses showed a similar pattern of results from the Pearson correlations reported above in the GUP, but in the EPP the three reported associations with ES probes were not significant in the Spearman correlations. This further indicates the different answer patterns in self-reported MW between our two samples. The detailed results of these additional versions of the correlations are available in Tables S3 – S6 in the supplementary materials.

Pairwise Pearson correlations for MAAS, SART, and ES measures. Correlation coefficients are reported for whole sample (‘Corr’), and for EPP and GUP samples separately. Individual plots below the diagonal are scatter plots with regression lines for the two variables intersecting at this cell, those on the diagonal show density distribution plots for the two samples. Significance markers: . \(=\) \(p< 0.1\) , * \(p< 0.05\) , ** \(p< 0.01\) , *** \(p< 0.001\) . This figure was created using R (v. 4.02) 55 with packages ‘ggplot2’ (v. 3.3.5) 56 and ‘GGally’ (v. 2.1.2) 58 .

This study entailed between-subject manipulations hypothesized to affect MW that are out of the scope of the current work. Briefly, we investigated whether exposing participants to auditory stimuli (5 Hz monaural or binaural auditory beats, silence, 440 Hz sine tone) could reduce their propensity to MW. Since such a finding has been reported earlier, in particular for participants exhibiting high proportions of MW 24 , we experimentally manipulated the occurrence of MW in three different ways. First, we varied the inter-stimulus-interval (1 vs. 2 s). Second, we implemented the stimuli in the SART predictably or unpredictably. Third, a creative problem-solving task was executed for a second time after the SART, and participants were either informed before the SART about the second execution or they were not informed.

These between-subject manipulations may have affected our estimates of associations between MW and mindfulness. To investigate this possibility, we first calculated ANOVAs with the experiment’s main manipulations (and all pairwise interactions) as predictors and measures from SART and ES as outcome variables. We then added the MAAS score as covariate to these, to create a set of comparable ANCOVAs. To evaluate whether our associations were affected by the experimental manipulations, we then checked two things. First, we compared the effect sizes ( \(\eta ^2\) ) of the total MAAS score in these ANCOVAs with the coefficient of determination ( \(r^2\) ) between the MAAS score and SART and ES measures. Second, we calculated model comparisons between the ANOVAs and ANCOVAs using likelihood-ratio tests (Table 5 ).

The effect sizes were for most combinations very similar in the correlations and the ANCOVAs. In all but one case, adding the MAAS score as covariate did not significantly improve the model fit. Only in the ES MW variable in GUP did adding the MAAS score as covariate significantly improve the model fit. There the estimate of association between ES MW and the MAAS score slightly increased when accounting for experimental manipulations. This result provides confirmatory evidence that MAAS and ES MW are weakly negatively associated in the GUP sample.

We examined the psychometrics of MW, meta-awareness of MW, and trait mindfulness, as well as the associations between these constructs. Overall, we found reasonably good psychometrics of all measures, and evidence that MW and trait mindfulness are indeed moderately negatively correlated. This association was not moderated by meta-awareness of MW. Neither the psychometrics nor moderating effects of meta-awareness can therefore readily explain that associations between MW and mindfulness are of a rather low magnitude.

In keeping with previous studies, we found overall good psychometric properties and evidence mostly consistent with a single-factor structure for the MAAS questionnaire. Our estimates of reliability of the MAAS were slightly higher than those reported in earlier studies, in both the EPP and GUP. For the English MAAS, the original publication reported internal consistencies in the range of [0.8, 0.87] 31 , and a further study reported 0.89 48 , but this value was 0.96 in our EPP. For the German MAAS, a Cronbach’s \(\alpha\) of 0.83 was reported in the initial publication on the psychometric properties of the questionnaire 49 , while the value in our GUP was 0.88. Very high internal consistencies might indicate redundancy in a questionnaire, suggesting some items are superfluous and can be removed, which would lead to a more efficient assessment 59 . Results on the proposed shorter versions of the MAAS (MAAS-5 and MAAS-3) outlined in this study support this notion and may provide researchers with tools to optimize data collection.

One peculiarity we observed in the MAAS data for the GUP was item 6 ( “I forget a person’s name almost as soon as I’ve been told it for the first time.” 31 ), which correlated very poorly with all other items and the total score. Interestingly, the authors of the German MAAS also observed complications with this item but decided to include it to ensure international comparability 49 . Specifically, they found an item-to-total correlation of r \(=\) 0.18 for item 6 while the next-lowest correlation was for item 1 (r \(=\) 0.26) and those for all other items ranged from 0.33 to 0.65 We did not observe, however, such a low item-to-total correlation of item 6 in EPP. Nevertheless, we assume that cultural differences or mere issues related to translation cannot account for low item-to-total correlation for this item, as it was also observed in a study with English-speaking participants from New Zealand 50 . Moreover, item 6 was also one of the most poorly correlated items in the original English article detailing the MAAS 31 . We suggest item 6 may only occasionally be problematic as its meaning is ambiguous, and can be understood in two different ways. First, it could—probably as intended by the authors of the scale—measure attention usually directed to a person introducing themselves, or it can be understood as asking for self-report on one’s long-term memory abilities, which is arguably an altogether different trait than mindfulness.

While reliability is routinely reported for questionnaires such as the MAAS, they are less common for cognitive behavioral measures, e.g. for the MW measures derived from the SART and ES 40 . Still, earlier studies generally reported high reliabilities also for the SART: e.g. between 0.83 and 0.89 for overall accuracy in the SART 42 , 44 , between 0.92 and 0.98 for SDs of RT 44 , 45 , and even as high as 0.94 to 0.98 for the accuracy of Nogo trials 41 (see Table 1 ). Some of these studies, however, used a shorter stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) and much smaller sample sizes (13 42 and 12 41 participants). Also, earlier studies reporting SART reliabilities were usually laboratory studies with more controlled environments. These factors might have led to even higher reliabilty estimates for measures derived from Nogo trials. Our study adds further reasonably high reliabilities with alphas ranging from 0.84 to 0.99, on measures derived from the Go trials of the SART. In contrast to previous studies, reliability estimates for measures derived from Nogo trials were markedly lower (between 0.24 and 0.71) in our samples. These were probably low in our study due to only a small fraction of the SART trials that can be used to derive these measures as we increased the SOA from the original version in order to foster MW. Overall reliabilities are further reduced when restricting the analyses to a short time window preceding ES probes. Filtering the usable trials to a specific time window seems predominately appropriate for neuroimaging studies looking to isolate brain activity patterns of MW, which is where this analysis strategy originated 27 . Researchers focusing on Nogo trials and segmenting the data accordingly, should therefore take care to ensure that the number of trials analyzed remains reasonably large, and bear in mind that reliability of measures derived with these strategies is likely limited. Our reliability estimates for the ES MW probes during the SART (0.91 in GUP and 0.89 in EPP) were within the range of what earlier studies reported (e.g., 0.89 43 and 0.93 45 ). Together with the reliability estimates of the MAAS, our study demonstrates that high reliabilities of the MAAS, SART, and ES for MW can also be obtained in an online study setting.

Our results also stress notions of caution related to recruiting participants via crowdsourcing platforms such as—as in our case—Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT, mturk.com). We noticed that the two samples behaved differently in the SART and ES, in that AMT participants (the EPP) were less likely to respond that their attention had been ‘off task’ but at the same time showed lower accuracy rates and slower, more varied RTs during the SART. This is likely to have also affected the estimate of association between self-reports of MW in ES probes and the MAAS score. A significant correlation was found in GUP, but not in EPP. The absence of a significant correlation could be due to lower variance in the ES probes of EPP versus GUP. We suggest the different patterns of results relating to the ES probes is not simply due to cultural or language differences, but rather due to differences in motivation to participate. Requesters at AMT are allowed to withhold payment if they are not satisfied with the performance of the participant. It thus seems reasonable to assume that some participants recruited through AMT reported being on task even when they were not. Our data underlies arguments made earlier that caution is warranted when recruiting via AMT and similar platforms, especially when using measures that are susceptible to the issues discussed above 60 , 61 . It might help to explicitly ensure participants that they will experience no disadvantages when they report being off task.

Our results support the hypothesis of a negative link between trait mindfulness and MW. Associations, however, were scattered over different measures and differed between our two samples: There was a moderate correlation of the MAAS with the self-report measure of MW (ES probes during the SART) in one of our samples (GUP) and with SART SDs of RTs and SART accuracy in the SART in the other sample (EPP). Low and absent associations between MW and mindfulness cannot be explained by low reliabilities of the measures we used, as reliabilities were generally satisfyingly high, with the exception of measures derived from SART Nogo trials. With that in mind, the associations based on measures with high realiabilities are only two: that between MAAS total score and ES MW in the GUP, and between MAAS total score and SDs of RTs in SART Go trials during the 10 s window before ES probes in the EPP. One potential explanation for finding the clear association between MAAS and ES MW only in the GUP might be a lack of variance in the EPP data as mentioned above. The lack of variance was due to a large proportion of participants who answered that they were rarely or never ‘off task’ during the experiment.

Despite good psychometrics of our measures, the link between trait mindfulness and MW was only moderate. A further explanation for rather low associations could be that meta-awareness of MW moderates the hypothesized associations. Our finding that meta-awareness of MW is not linked to mindfulness goes against such a hypothesis and some empirical evidence 7 , 23 . However, our results are in accordance with more recent papers that also do not find a moderating effect of meta-awareness on the association between MW and mindfulness 4 , 5 . Nayda et al. 5 reported negative associations between both, the propensity to ‘tune out’ (meta-aware MW) with mindfulness, and the propensity to ‘zone out’ (meta-unaware MW). An earlier publication by Deng et al. 4 found insignificant correlations between trait MW and both ‘zone out’ and ‘tune out’ propensities. It seems noteworthy that both correlations of the Deng et al. 4 study are in the same range and direction as in Nayda et al. 5 but do not reach statistical significance likely due to the low sample size (N \(=\) 23). A potential caveat here is that these rates are calculated using the total of MW probes, rather than the total of meta-awareness probes only. These estimates are therefore biased in that the sum of the ‘tune out’ and ‘zone out’ rates is perfectly inverse proportional to the ‘on-task’ rate. In our analyses, we calculated the meta-awareness rate as proportion of the total of meta-awareness probes instead of the total of MW probes. We found no significant correlation between meta-awareness of MW and mindfulness. Thus, further research seems needed to isolate a potentially moderating effect of meta-awareness on the correlation between MW and mindfulness.

A further reason for low associations between MW and mindfulness could result from the difference in the trait versus transient nature of the constructs. Mindfulness is conceived and measured as a general personality trait. However, MW is a much more transient and fluctuating phenomenon during an ongoing and often boring task. Moreover, boredom itself may explain the low associations between MW and mindfulness. In MW research, the SART is often chosen as an ongoing task, because it is boring and therefore is thought to facilitate MW. The notion that boredom is an enabling factor for MW is supported by two findings. First, boredom has been shown to correlate with attentional lapses as measured with the SART 62 . Second, positive correlations between boredom and MW have been recently reported 63 . In contrast, when participants respond to the mindfulness questions of the MAAS, it is unclear to what extent participants consider boring ongoing tasks (e.g., “I rush through activities without being really attentive to them.” see Table 3 for the complete list of items of the MAAS). Therefore, while boredom seems a relevant aspect of MW when measured with the SART, this is not assessed with the MAAS. Together, this emphasizes the necessity of investigating the role of boredom in the relation between MW and mindfulness in future studies.

One may argue that a further reason for low associations between MW and trait mindfulness could be that the on-task state is more heterogeneous than previously thought. Heterogeneous on-task states were identified by assessing ongoing thought with multidimensional experience sampling (MDES), i.e., extending ES with several questions inquiring about the thoughts’ content and nature 64 . Principal component analysis (PCA) of MDES data revealed several components taxing into the on-task state, which were associated with distinct neural correlates 65 , 59 , 60 , 68 . One component was related to self-focused off-task thoughts while another component indicated detailed task focus. This task-focused component was common in cognitively demanding tasks like tasks measuring working memory, task switching, and gambling. However, it was less observed in low-demand tasks like the SART, where self-focused off-task thoughts prevail 64 . Together, these studies suggest that being more mindful might be linked to how people engage with tasks, perhaps by doing so in a more focused way. The possibility of multiple on-task states may therefore, contribute to the relatively low estimate of the association between mindfulness and ongoing thought.

Finally, low associations between MW and mindfulness could be due to insufficient validity, rather than reliability of the measures we used. While our current study focuses on reliability others have focused on issues related to validity, especially concerning the questionnaires to measure mindfulness 69 . On the one hand, the MAAS in particular has been shown to correlate reasonably well with other questionnaires measuring mindfulness such as the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ) 70 . Further evidence for converging validity with, e.g., positive affect or attention, as well as evidence for discriminant validity, e.g., with anxiety and rumination, has been found in studies reporting correlations with MAAS scores 31 , 32 . On the other hand, questionnaires rely on introspective capabilities and may be subject to bias. A recent study by Isbel et al. 70 questioned especially the discriminant validity of the MAAS and the FFMQ as these measures increased following both a mindfulness training intervention and a control training intervention not aimed at mindfulness. Rather, objective accuracy of breath counting has been found to respond selectively to the mindfulness training intervention 70 . A potential reason why the breath counting task responded selectively to the mindfulness training is that mindfulness training itself often consists of exercises to guide one’s attention specifically on the breath. It is hence a rather near transfer from mindfulness training to an increase in accuracy in breath counting. Nevertheless, more research exploring the practical validity of mindfulness measures is required.

Recent methodological developments in MW research highlight limitations in our findings and offer advice for future research. Contemporary studies of ongoing thought that utilized MDES show that different tasks used in MW research elicit several distinct thought patterns to varying degrees 64 , 67 . Our study is consequently limited by the fact that we only used the SART to investigate the association between individual variation in mindfulness and MW instead of several tasks. The SART also has the limitation that it does not lead to much detailed task focus and tends to stimulate self-focused MW 64 . Due to that, it is unclear whether our findings generalize to other tasks or whether they are specific to the SART and thus to those types of ongoing thoughts more likely to be evoked by the SART like self-focused MW.

Besides the heterogeneity of ongoing thoughts, the relationship between MW and mindfulness is likely modulated by various other factors. A recent study has highlighted MW as a complex phenomenon that warrants a multi-faceted approach that includes a) dispositional traits, like conscientiousness, agreeableness, or mindfulness, b) contextual factors, like motivation or alertness, and c) cognitive abilities, like working memory capacity 71 . If the relationship between MW and mindfulness is embedded within such a multi-faceted approach, the association between these two factors might be diluted by other potential confounding factors that were not accounted for. In this regard, future research will benefit from assessing MW and mindfulness with a broad set of tools including MDES and multiple tasks with variable demands that elicit different patterns of ongoing thoughts.

Participants

A total of 715 participants performed or started our online experiment between October 2019 and January 2021. We excluded participants from the data analysis for these reasons and in this order: Repeated participation (n \(=\) 11), incomplete data due to technical issues (n \(=\) 1), incomplete or delayed participation in the experiment (time in experiment < 23 min or > 120 min [n \(=\) 59]), low number of correct SART trials (proportion of correct Go trials < 2/3 [n \(=\) 51], or proportion of correct Nogo trials < 1/2 [n \(=\) 22]), and outliers who took a long time to answer the ES probes (n \(=\) 30). For this last point we established a cutoff based on the interquartile range (IQR) due to the highly skewed distribution of these values. Cutoff was the 75th percentile plus three times the IQR. We based our data analyses on a total sample of 541, separated into 313 GUP (aged between 16 and 85, M \(=\) 38.78, SD \(=\) 12.95) and 228 EPP (aged between 19 and 68, M \(=\) 34.27, SD \(=\) 11.39). Further demographic characteristics are given in Table 6 .

We recruited participants for two different language versions of the experiment through various routes. The GUP (n \(=\) 313) consists of: (a) 97 participants recruited by the students of two classes in the autumn 2019 and spring 2020 semesters at UniDistance Suisse; (b) 200 students and members of the public interested in participating in experimental research from our institute’s pool of research participants; and (c) 16 participants who followed links in an information email to university employees and on different websites. The EPP (n − 228) contains: (a) 217 participants recruited through AMT, (b) 10 who were PhD students at the Department of Epileptology at the University of Bonn, and (c) 1 who followed a link from an external website.

Those recruited through AMT were paid USD 3.50 when they had completed the whole experiment. Students in the Bachelor’s program in Psychology at the UniDistance Suisse received course credits for their participation. Other participants received no compensation. All participants gave informed consent by reading information provided online and then checking off tick boxes in an online form before they proceeded to the experiment. The study was carried out following all the relevant guidelines and regulations. The study and its compliance with relevant guidelines and regulations was approved by the ethical review committee of the Faculty of Psychology at UniDistance Suisse ( https://distanceuniversity.ch/research/ethics-commission/ ). In particular, all procedures are in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki.

The data reported here was collected in a study also investigating the effects of experimental manipulations on MW. Participants performed the SART with intermittent ES probes to directly obtain self-reports of episodes of MW. These experimental manipulations are outside the scope of the current work as they focus on potential effects of auditory beat stimulation on MW 24 , 72 and will be reported elsewhere. Briefly, experimental manipulations were performed in a \(4\times 2\times 2\times 2\) between-subjects design and included the independent variables Auditory Beat Stimulation (5 Hz binaural, 5 Hz monaural; 440 Hz pure tone; no sound), SART ISI (1 or 2 s), Predictability of the Number Sequence in the SART (random or ascending), and Expectancy of an ensuing creativity task (expected or unexpected). Dependent variables are RTs and Accuracy during the SART and ES MW probes. It was for the purpose of this study, that we collected data using the MAAS.

Instruments

To assess trait mindfulness we applied the MAAS, a 15-item questionnaire that determines attention to the present in everyday experiences 31 . For the German version of the experiment, we used the validated German translation available from the Leibniz Institute for Psychology Information (ZPID) 73 .

To measure MW indirectly through lapses in sustained attention in a deliberately monotonous task, we used the SART 21 . The SART is a Go/No-go task that uses digits as stimuli which are presented individually on screen with a fixation cross shown between stimuli. Participants are asked to react to all digits (Go trials) except for the number 7 (Nogo trials). We adapted the original SART with the intention to make it more monotonous, in order to elicit more MW. Specifically, we displayed each stimulus longer (2 s instead of 250 ms), had a longer ISI (1 or 2 s instead of 900 ms), and used a fixed font size (instead of randomly varying font sizes) to present our stimuli 21 .

We assessed self-reported MW using ES probes during the SART. In intervals between 25 and 35 s, participants were asked: “Immediately before this question appeared, was your attention focused ON the task or OFF task?” with a dichotomous forced-choice answer. When “OFF task” was selected, a second question appeared: “Were you aware that your attention was OFF task?” with a dichotomous forced choice answer again (yes or no). There was no time limit to answer these probes.

To further increase MW by adding a cognitive distraction during the SART and to assess particpants’ creativity, we implemented a short task for divergent thinking based on the alternative/unusual uses concept originally introduced by Guilford 74 . In this unusual uses task (UUT), participants were given 20 s to find alternative uses for a brick, with the original use described as “building houses”. Participants entered their answer in a large text field and were asked to enter one answer per line.

We implemented the MAAS and SART with ES as an online experiment using the JavaScript-based online experiment builder “lab.js” ( https://lab.js.org 75 . Participants were required to wear headphones during the experiment. We included a headphone test before the SART to ensure participants had correctly placed the headphones and could listen to the stimulation. Runnable files and code for both language versions of the experiment can be found in the supplementary materials at https://osf.io/8kg6z .

The online experiment started with information about the experiment, data processing, and informed consent request. This was followed by a short demographic questionnaire, the MAAS, the headphone test, the UUT, and 20 min of the SART. After the SART, a summary page informed the participants about their performance and a debriefing page gave further background information about the study.

Data processing, analysis and creation of figures and tables were done in R (v 4.0.2) 55 , using the following packages in addition to base R: ‘tidyverse’ 76 for various data wrangling and processing tasks and for data visualizations via ‘ggplot2’ 56 , ‘GGally’ 58 for data visualizations, ‘e1071’ 77 for kurtosis and skewness calculations, ‘lubridate’ 78 for handling of date and time data, ‘lavaan’ 79 for confirmatory factor analyses, ‘stargazer’ 80 to create and export LaTeX tables, ‘splithalf’ 57 for permutation-based split-half calculatio ns.

Data availability

The datasets generated and analysed for the current study are available in the Open Science Framework (OSF) repository, https://osf.io/wg9q5 . Tables, figures, and other supplementary materials specifically for this publication are available in a different repository at OSF, https://osf.io/8kg6z .

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank all students of the following two classes at the UniDistance Suisse, who recruited participants for the experiment: “Methoden III: Experimentelle Übungen” during the fall semester 2019, “Wissenschaftliches Arbeiten” during the spring semester 2020.

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Using the CRediT contributor roles taxonomy (casrai.org/credit/). A.B.: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Software, Validation, Visualization, Writing—original draft, Writing—review & editing. L.C.: Conceptualization, Resources, Writing—review & editing. A.R-M.: Conceptualization, Writing—review & editing. F.M.: Resources, Writing—review & editing. N.R.: Resources, Writing—review & editing. J.F.: Conceptualization, Writing—review & editing. T.P.R.: Conceptualization, Resources, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Software, Validation, Supervision, Writing—original draft, Writing—review & editing.

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Effects of 5 hz auditory beat stimulation on mind wandering and sustained attention in an online experiment.

• Angelo Belardi
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Journal of Cognitive Enhancement (2024)

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When Mind Wandering is a Strategy, Not a Disadvantage

• Cognitive Psychology
• Executive Function
• Multitasking
• Psychological Science
• Task Performance

Whether we are listening in a meeting or going for a walk, our minds often stray from the present task to other thoughts. People’s minds wander differently across situations, and new research suggests that we can modulate our mind wandering from moment to moment in response to the challenges we expect to encounter in a task.

In a study published in Psychological Science, postdoctoral fellow Paul Seli of Harvard Univeristy and colleagues Jonathan S. A. Carriere, Jeffrey D. Wammes, Evan F. Risko, Daniel L. Schacter, and Daniel Smilek found that people can adjust their rate of mind wandering during an attention-demanding task without decreasing their performance on that task.

Previous research suggests that mind wandering is situation-related and varies based on a task’s difficulty, meaning that easier tasks require fewer executive resources and allow for more mind wandering than difficult, attention-demanding tasks. Although easier tasks may allow an individual to use shared resources for more mind wandering, much of the literature supports the idea that mind wandering is detrimental to a task no matter the difficulty.

Seli wanted to investigate whether mind wandering might be harmless during certain types of attention-demanding tasks:

“To date, the vast majority of tasks used in the literature on mind wandering have been very attentionally demanding,” Seli said . “It occurred to me that many of the tasks we perform in daily life are quite different from these sorts of tasks, since they don’t constantly demand our attention.”

For these tasks, such as riding a bike or reading emails, the researchers were interested to see if people could adjust their mind wandering from moment to moment. This type of flexibility would suggest that in certain contexts, mind wandering does not inhibit performance.

“Since we know that people spend a considerable portion of their lives engaged in mind wandering, such a finding would be very welcomed silver lining,” Seli said.

The authors designed a novel attention task for the study , featuring an analog clock that ticks once per second and makes a full revolution around the clock face every 20 seconds. Participants were instructed to press a button every time the clock hand pointed at 12:00, with correct responses occurring within the 50 msec before or 500 msec after the clock hand reached 12:00. The researchers awarded bonus money for every correct response to increase motivation for good performance. The critical task of pushing the button was completely predictable, and the participants were told that their minds might wander during this task.

The researchers also presented thought probes to measure participants’ rates of mind wandering. Twenty probes appeared during random revolutions, stopping the clock’s rotation — participants reported the extent to which their thoughts were on or off task at that moment. Participants chose from “on task,” “intentionally mindwandering,” or “unintentionally mindwandering,” and the clock would begin to move again.

In the 5 seconds after the task event, participants reported mind wandering about 33% of the time, and in the next 10 seconds their mind wandering increased to about 50% of the time. Although the participants varied in how much they mind wandered, it did not seem to affect performance on the task.

Rates of intentional mind wandering were higher than or the same as rates of unintentional mind wandering, suggesting that participants may have realized they were able to let their minds wander without reducing their performance:

“In other words,” Seli explains, “they strategically copped a daydream when they could afford to do so.”

The results support the theory that mind wandering uses the same executive resources as attention-demanding tasks, and suggests that a control mechanism can determine where to allocate these resources. Mind wandering may even have strategic benefits, allowing us to multitask, problem solve, and think ahead.

The present study opens a door to investigating how people may differ in their ability to modulate mind wandering. Seli and colleagues suggest that age and working memory capacity could potentially affect an individual’s level of control over their wandering mind.

Seli, P., Carriere, J. S. A., Wammes, J. D, Risko, E. F., Schacter, D. L., & Smilek, D. (2018). On the clock: Evidence for rapid and strategic modulation of mind wandering. Psychological Science . doi: 10.1177/0956797618761039

Reuell, P. (19 June, 2018). When wandering minds are just fine. The Harvard Gazette . Retrieved from: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2018/06/mind-wandering-is-fine-in-some-situations-harvard-based-study-says/

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The power of daydreams: 4 studies on the surprising science of mind-wandering

[ted id=1607 width=560 height=315]

What makes us happy? It’s one of the most complicated puzzles of human existence — and one that, so far, 87 speakers have explored in TEDTalks .

In today’s talk , Matt Killingsworth (who studied under  Dan Gilbert  at Harvard) shares a novel approach to the study of happiness — an app, Track Your Happiness , which allows people to chart their feelings on a moment-by-moment basis. As they go about their day, app users get random pings, asking them to share their current activity and note their mood. When Killingsworth gave this talk at TEDxCambridge in 2011, the app had collected data from more than 15,000 people in 80 countries, representing a wide range of ages, education levels and occupations. In this talk, Killingsworth reveals a very surprising finding: that mind-wandering appears to factor heavily into this happiness equation.

“As human beings, we have this unique ability to have our minds stray,” says Killingsworth on the TEDx stage . “This ability to focus our attention on something other than the present is amazing — it allows us to learn and plan and reason.”

While most people think of mind-wandering as a lifting escape from daily drudgery, the Track Your Happiness data shows that this may not the case. In fact, mind-wandering appears to be correlated with unhappiness . When people were mind-wandering, they reported feeling happy only 56% of the time. Meanwhile, when they were focused on the present moment, they reported feeling happy 66% of the time. This effect was true regardless of the activity the person was doing — be it waiting in a traffic jam or eating a delicious dinner. (Read Killingsworth’s study, published in the journal Science in 2010 , to see a breakdown of mind-wandering rates by activity.)

According to Killingsworth’s data, people mind-wander most when in the shower and least when they are having sex. But, still, mind-wandering is a constant. Overall, people mind-wander 47% of the time. Perhaps not such a good thing if it relates to unhappiness,

To hear more about mind-wandering — and about the importance of studying happiness in general — watch Killingsworth’s talk . And after the jump, read several more fascinating studies on the psychology of mind-wandering — some of which will make you feel better about your daydreaming.

A relationship to working memory Mind-wandering might make us feel less content, but it could also have a functional purpose. A recent study published in the journal Psychological Science suggests that mind-wandering might be a sign of a high capacity working memory — in other words, the ability to think about multiple things at once. Researchers asked study participants to press a button and, as they went, checked in to see if their minds were wandering. After the task was complete, researchers gave participants a measure of their working memory. Interestingly, those who were found to be frequent mind-wanderers during the first task showed a greater capacity of working memory. Researcher Jonathan Smallwood of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Science explains, “Our results suggest that the sorts of planning that people do quite often in daily life — when they’re on the bus, when they’re cycling to work, when they’re in the shower — are probably supported by working memory. Their brains are trying to allocate resources to the most pressing problems.”

A key to memory formation Mind-wandering might also play a vital function in helping us form memories. New York University neuroscientist Arielle Tambini looked at memory consolidation in this study published in the journal Neuron in 2010 . Participants in the study were asked to look at pairs of images and, in between, were instructed to take a break to think about anything they wanted. Using fMRI, the researchers looked at the activity in the hippocampus cortical regions while they did both. The study showed that these two areas of the brain appear to work together — and that the greater the levels of brain activity in both areas, the stronger the subjects’ recall of the image pairing was. Explains Lila Davichi, who oversaw the study , “Your brain is working for you when you’re resting, so rest is important for memory and cognitive function. This is something we don’t appreciate much, especially when today’s information technologies keep us working round-the-clock … Taking a coffee break after class can actually help you retain that information you just learned.”

A creative boost As the cliché goes, the best ideas usually come when you are least expecting them. A recent study published in the journal Psychological Science gives a clue as to why. A research team led by Benjamin Baird and Jonathan Schooler of the University of California at Santa Barbara asked participants to take “unusual uses” tests — brainstorming alternate ways to use an everyday object like a toothpick for two minutes. Study participants did two of these sessions, and then were given a 12-minute break, during which they were asked to rest, perform a demanding memory exercise or do a reaction time activity designed to maximize their mind-wandering. After the break, they did four more unusual uses tests — two of them repeats. While all of the groups performed comparably on the two new unusual uses lists, the group that had performed the mind-wandering tasks performed 41% better then the other groups on the unusual uses lists they were repeating. “The implication is that mind-wandering was only helpful for problems that were already being mentally chewed on. It didn’t seem to lead to a general increase in creative problem-solving ability,” says Baird .

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Does mind-wandering make you unhappy, when are we happiest when we stay in the moment, says researcher matt killingsworth ..

What are the major causes of human happiness?

It’s an important question but one that science has yet to fully answer. We’ve learned a lot about the demographics of happiness and how it’s affected by conditions like income, education, gender, and marriage. But the scientific results are surprising: Factors like these don’t seem to have particularly strong effects. Yes, people are generally happier if they make more money rather than less, or are married instead of single, but the differences are quite modest.

Although our goals in life often revolve around these sorts of milestones, my research is driven by the idea that happiness may have more to do with the contents of our moment-to-moment experiences than with the major conditions of our lives. It certainly seems that fleeting aspects of our everyday lives—such as what we’re doing, who we’re with, and what we’re thinking about—have a big influence on our happiness, and yet these are the very factors that have been most difficult for scientists to study.

A few years ago, I came up with a way to study people’s moment-to-moment happiness in daily life on a massive scale, all over the world, something we’d never been able to do before. This took the form of trackyourhappiness.org, which uses iPhones to monitor people’s happiness in real time.

My results suggest that happiness is indeed highly sensitive to the contents of our moment-to-moment experience. And one of the most powerful predictors of happiness is something we often do without even realizing it: mind-wandering.

Be here now

As human beings, we possess a unique and powerful cognitive ability to focus our attention on something other than what is happening in the here and now. A person could be sitting in his office working on his computer, and yet he could be thinking about something else entirely: the vacation he had last month, which sandwich he’s going to buy for lunch, or worrying that he’s going bald.

This ability to focus our attention on something other than the present is really amazing. It allows us to learn and plan and reason in ways that no other species of animal can. And yet it’s not clear what the relationship is between our use of this ability and our happiness.

You’ve probably heard people suggest that you should stay focused on the present. “Be here now,” as Ram Dass advised back in 1971. Maybe, to be happy, we need to stay completely immersed and focused on our experience in the moment. Maybe this is good advice; maybe mind-wandering is a bad thing.

On the other hand, when our minds wander, they’re unconstrained. We can’t change the physical reality in front of us, but we can go anywhere in our minds. Since we know people want to be happy, maybe when our minds wander we tend to go to someplace happier than the reality that we leave behind. It would make a lot of sense. In other words, maybe the pleasures of the mind allow us to increase our happiness by mind-wandering.

Since I’m a scientist, I wanted to try to resolve this debate with some data. I collected this data using trackyourhappiness.org.

How does it work? Basically, I send people signals at random times throughout the day, and then I ask them questions about their experience at the instant just before the signal. The idea is that if we can watch how people’s happiness goes up and down over the course of the day, and try to understand how things like what people are doing, who they’re with, what they’re thinking about, and all the other factors that describe our experiences relate to those ups and downs in happiness, we might eventually be able to discover some of the major causes of human happiness.

This essay is based a 2011 TED talk by Matt Killingsworth.

In the results I’m going to describe, I will focus on people’s responses to three questions. The first was a happiness question: How do you feel? on a scale ranging from very bad to very good. Second, an activity question: What are you doing? on a list of 22 different activities including things like eating and working and watching TV. And finally a mind-wandering question: Are you thinking about something other than what you’re currently doing? People could say no (in other words, they are focused only on their current activity) or yes (they are thinking about something else). We also asked if the topic of those thoughts is pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant. Any of those yes responses are what we called mind-wandering.

We’ve been fortunate with this project to collect a lot of data, a lot more data of this kind than has ever been collected before, over 650,000 real-time reports from over 15,000 people. And it’s not just a lot of people, it’s a really diverse group, people from a wide range of ages, from 18 to late 80s, a wide range of incomes, education levels, marital statuses, and so on. They collectively represent every one of 86 occupational categories and hail from over 80 countries.

Wandering toward unhappiness

So what did we find?

First of all, people’s minds wander a lot. Forty-seven percent of the time, people are thinking about something other than what they’re currently doing. Consider that statistic next time you’re sitting in a meeting or driving down the street.

How does that rate depend on what people are doing? When we looked across 22 activities, we found a range—from a high of 65 percent when people are taking a shower or brushing their teeth, to 50 percent when they’re working, to 40 percent when they’re exercising. This went all the way down to sex, when 10 percent of the time people’s minds are wandering. In every activity other than sex, however, people were mind-wandering at least 30 percent of the time, which I think suggests that mind-wandering isn’t just frequent, it’s ubiquitous. It pervades everything that we do.

How does mind-wandering relate to happiness? We found that people are substantially less happy when their minds are wandering than when they’re not, which is unfortunate considering we do it so often. Moreover, the size of this effect is large—how often a person’s mind wanders, and what they think about when it does, is far more predictive of happiness than how much money they make, for example.

Now you might look at this result and say, “Ok, on average people are less happy when they’re mind-wandering, but surely when their minds are straying away from something that wasn’t very enjoyable to begin with, at least then mind-wandering will be beneficial for happiness.”

As it turns out, people are less happy when they’re mind-wandering no matter what they’re doing. For example, people don’t really like commuting to work very much; it’s one of their least enjoyable activities. Yet people are substantially happier when they’re focused only on their commute than when their mind is wandering off to something else. This pattern holds for every single activity we measured, including the least enjoyable. It’s amazing.

But does mind-wandering actually cause unhappiness, or is it the other way around? It could be the case that when people are unhappy, their minds wander. Maybe that’s what’s driving these results.

We’re lucky in this data in that we have many responses from each person, and so we can look and see, does mind-wandering tend to precede unhappiness, or does unhappiness tend to precede mind-wandering? This gives us some insight into the causal direction.

As it turns out, there is a strong relationship between mind-wandering now and being unhappy a short time later, consistent with the idea that mind-wandering is causing people to be unhappy. In contrast, there’s no relationship between being unhappy now and mind-wandering a short time later. Mind-wandering precedes unhappiness but unhappiness does not precede mind-wandering. In other words, mind-wandering seems likely to be a cause, and not merely a consequence, of unhappiness.

How could this be happening? I think a big part of the reason is that when our minds wander, we often think about unpleasant things: our worries, our anxieties, our regrets. These negative thoughts turn out to have a gigantic relationship to (un)happiness. Yet even when people are thinking about something they describe as neutral, they’re still considerably less happy than when they’re not mind-wandering. In fact, even when they’re thinking about something they describe as pleasant, they’re still slightly less happy than when they aren’t mind-wandering at all.

The lesson here isn’t that we should stop mind-wandering entirely—after all, our capacity to revisit the past and imagine the future is immensely useful, and some degree of mind-wandering is probably unavoidable. But these results do suggest that mind-wandering less often could substantially improve the quality of our lives. If we learn to fully engage in the present , we may be able to cope more effectively with the bad moments and draw even more enjoyment from the good ones.

About the Author

Matt Killingsworth

Matt Killingsworth, Ph.D., is a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar. He studies the nature and causes of human happiness, and is the creator of www.trackyourhappiness.org which uses smartphones to study happiness in real-time during everyday life. Recent research topics have included the relationship between happiness and the content of everyday experiences, the percentage of everyday experiences that are intrinsically valuable, and the degree of congruence between the causes of momentary happiness and of one's overall satisfaction with life. Matt earned his Ph.D. in psychology at Harvard University.

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The brain on silent: mind wandering, mindful awareness, and states of mental tranquility

David r. vago.

1 Functional Neuroimaging Laboratory, Brigham & Women's Hospital and Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts

Fadel Zeidan

2 Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy, Wake Forest School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, North Carolina

Mind wandering and mindfulness are often described as divergent mental states with opposing effects on cognitive performance and mental health. Spontaneous mind wandering is typically associated with self-reflective states that contribute to negative processing of the past, worrying/fantasizing about the future, and disruption of primary task performance. On the other hand, mindful awareness is frequently described as a focus on present sensory input without cognitive elaboration or emotional reactivity, and is associated with improved task performance and decreased stress-related symptomology. Unfortunately, such distinctions fail to acknowledge similarities and interactions between the two states. Instead of an inverse relationship between mindfulness and mind wandering, a more nuanced characterization of mindfulness may involve skillful toggling back and forth between conceptual and nonconceptual processes and networks supporting each state, to meet the contextually specified demands of the situation. In this article, we present a theoretical analysis and plausible neurocognitive framework of the restful mind, in which we attempt to clarify potentially adaptive contributions of both mind wandering and mindful awareness through the lens of the extant neurocognitive literature on intrinsic network activity, meditation, and emerging descriptions of stillness and nonduality. A neurophenomenological approach to probing modality-specific forms of concentration and nonconceptual awareness is presented that may improve our understanding of the resting state. Implications for future research are discussed.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. –T.S. Eliot a

Introduction

What are the phenomenological characteristics of a restful mind? With eyes closed, removed from external distraction, a state of wakeful relaxation may easily be cultivated. Yet, left to its musings, it is common for the mind to experience a relentless stream of evaluative thoughts, emotions, or feelings without much effort. “Monkey mind” is a metaphor for the mind's natural tendency to be restless— jumping from one thought or feeling to another, as a monkey swings from limb to limb. Given the heavy demand of modern life on cognitive load, managing the onslaught of ongoing sensory and mental events throughout daily life and improving efficiency of mental processing is of high concern. Tranquility and stillness of mind, as described in the Buddhist Nikāyas , b are believed to reflect a natural settling of thoughts and emotions, in which there is stability of attention, sensory clarity, and equanimity of affect and behavior. 1 This state is believed to develop through systematic mental training involving a combination of concentration, nonconceptual observation, and discernment. 2 – 4

Although the majority of research on brain function has focused on task-evoked activity, current research focusing on the task-unrelated resting mind–brain is beginning to reveal the critical importance of this largely ignored part of human life. Since the advent of neurophysiological recording, it has been determined that the brain is never truly resting. Hans Berger first observed that all states of wakefulness and sleep reveal a spectrum of mixed amplitudes and frequencies of electrical activity that does not cease. According to thought-sampling studies during mind wandering, 5 – 7 the content of the restless mind is often incredibly rich and self-relevant, characterized by spontaneous thoughts and emotions concerned with the past and hopes, fears, and fantasies about the future, often including interpersonal feelings, unfulfilled goals, unresolved challenges, and intrusive memories. With respect to cost and benefit, research on the “resting state” is demonstrating how task-unrelated or stimulus-independent thought (SIT) may adaptively organize brain function 8 and how the intrinsic neural activity supporting SIT affects brain metabolism and neuroplasticity. 8 – 11 Although there are certainly benefits to having access to the rich landscape of spontaneous thoughts for the purpose of creative incubation, 7 , 12 problem solving, 6 and goal setting, 13 an inability to focus attention in the face of irrelevant distraction by such thoughts can be problematic. Unfortunately, humans have been shown to experience this intrinsic undercurrent of spontaneous, self-generated thought during ongoing task demands as a form of interference, distraction, or rumination approximately 50% of each waking day. 5 , 14 SIT often interferes with the ability to remain externally vigilant, 15 , 16 remain focused or concentrate on the task at hand, 16 properly encode external information, 17 listen, 18 perform, 16 , 19 or even sleep. 20 In addition to the apparent inefficiency that SIT contributes to daily life, there is now a large literature linking a majority of self-generated thought to negatively valenced content and negative mood states, 21 , 22 future unhappiness, 5 and the maintenance of psychopathology, such as generalized anxiety disorder 23 – 25 or major depressive disorder. 26 , 27 Most recently, there has been interest in exploring how particular forms of mental training that include a state of mindful awareness allow individuals to change the relationship with the resting state and experience the stream of stimulus-independent mental content in an adaptive way. 28 – 30

Mindfulness and mind wandering are often described as two divergent mental states; 31 , 32 yet, both are frequently referenced in the context of mental rest. There is a subtle difference in both awareness and engagement with the flow of mental objects that may determine the adaptive or maladaptive nature by which the mental content influences one's current mood and future behavior ( Fig. 1 ). Currently, there is great interest in better understanding the neural mechanisms that support resting-state dynamics, states of mindful awareness, and their respective contributions to mood and cognition (see Refs. 31 and 32 ). In this article, we examine a more nuanced perspective on particular mental states that reflect “rest,” mental quiet, stimulus independence, and the neurobiological and physiological circuitry supporting the various flavors of what may constitute a “restful mind.” Occasionally, references are made to the historical Buddhist literature for the purpose of exploring an epistemology of mind as it relates to contemporary secular adaptations of the construct mindfulness.

Variations in awareness during meditation and mind-wandering rest. Visual (V), auditory (A), and somatic (S) modalities of experience are depicted. Awareness in the present moment is depicted by the blue band around mental objects arising and passing through time. Width of the band represents the temporal focus of awareness. The more temporally extended awareness is in time, the more mental stickiness and disengagement delays are apparent. Wider bands refer to difficulty disengaging from mental or sensory objects, greater projection into past or future experience, and a resulting smaller aperture. FA meditation focuses on only one mental/physical object in experience (somatic object is depicted here). All modalities of experience enter awareness in OM meditation and mind wandering (MW). Variations in qualities of object orientation (engagement/disengagement), clarity, and aperture in experience are depicted. These three qualities are represented, respectively, by the width of the circles for each mental object, brightness of the fill color, and diameter of the ring of awareness that sits in the present moment of time. Adept meditators are believed to experience higher clarity (phenomenal intensity) in both forms of meditation, whereas MW is believed to represent low clarity or dullness. Low object orientation or engagement represents less mental stickiness and rapid disengagement, leaving available more cognitive resources. Aperture (scope of awareness) is believed to be intentionally narrow for a concentration practice and high for OM practice. In MW, the spotlight of attention is typically narrow and unintentional because of increased engagement with each mental object; resources are subsequently depleted. Adapted, with permission, from Farb et al. 27 and Lutz et al. 124 See Lutz et al. 124 for more extensive descriptions of clarity and aperture, as well as for other potential experiential descriptors relevant to mindfulness.

The (not-so) resting state: mind wandering, evaluation, and self-referential processing

The resting state is commonly referred to as the baseline state of mind in quietly awake individuals and in the context of no particular task. Given its task-negative orientation, the resting state has been used as a functional contrast for most active task-positive conditions in functional neuroimaging studies. 33 , 34 In fact, this state has been used as a control or baseline condition against conditions of interest in an overwhelming number of neuroimaging studies, since such methods were introduced in the early 1980s. 33 The instructions for this passive baseline state are frequently given in some variation of, “let your mind freely wander without thinking of anything in particular,” “relax,” or “stay still and do nothing,” and involve either eyes opened or closed; however, to avoid the occurrence of sleep, many protocols have encouraged the use of open eyes, with (and without) a fixation cross as a visual stimulus on which to rest one's eyes.

Interest in the resting state has mostly reflected the interest in the methodological function by which to probe spontaneous low-frequency (<0.1 Hz) blood oxygen level–dependent (BOLD) fluctuations (LFBF) that demonstrate consistent spatially and temporally coherent connectivity among large-scale functional brain networks. 35 – 38 Across each of the variations in the above-mentioned instructions, there is robust consistency in detection of these networks, suggesting that low-level physiological noise, task load (fixation), eye movement, or the presence of visual input cannot influence the results. 39 Furthermore, these large-scale intrinsic resting-state networks (RSNs) appear to reflect a fundamental aspect of the brain's organization and are consistently apparent across waking states, including task performance, sleep, 40 and even general anesthesia. 41 At least 10 organized RSNs have been identified during rest, including the default mode network (DMN; Fig. 2 ), with each one reflecting specific functions that cohere to the intrinsic connectivity patterns (i.e., language, attention, executive functioning, salience, sensorimotor activity, or mind wandering). 42 – 45

RSN partition and global fc variability of other networks with the frontoparietal network (FPN). (A) Shown is the network partition of 264 putative functional regions in 10 major RSNs identified at rest through independent component analysis. (B) The connectivity between the FPN and all other RSNs and associated mean variable connectivity are shown. The FPN is believed to act as a hub to enhance connectivity between all other RSNs. Adapted, with permission, from Cole et al. 45

A critical consideration in the interpretation of spontaneous LFBF is the extent to which it is due to specific functional behavior or mentation. There is evidence that varied mental content during the resting time period can modulate functional activity across RSNs, suggesting content has an effect on functional variations in LFBF. 46 , 47 This would seem plausible given that people are engaged in unconstrained mind wandering while laying quietly awake in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner, with a variety of mental content to account for low-level task activation. 47 Yet, there are a number of arguments 38 supporting the idea that mentation during mind wandering is unlikely to be the dominant source of LFBF. 38 Nevertheless, task relevance is often difficult to determine with SIT, unless it is in direct contrast to some attentionally demanding task. Mental content during mind wandering may indeed be of critical importance to task-related processing (e.g., memory consolidation, prospection) or to other ongoing processes that are fundamental to self-specificity. 14 , 48 , 49 Spontaneous fluctuations found in RSNs are believed to be regulated differently than task- or stimulus-driven brain activity. One popular theory holds that the intrinsic activity from LFBF may be more closely related to long-range coordination of higher frequency electrical activity that facilitates coordination and organization of information processing across several spatiotemporal ranges. 50 , 51 Metabolic demands at rest also do not suggest a strong correlation with cellular activity; 8 , 10 , 51 yet, the resting state does not reflect a zero-activity physiological baseline from which attention manifests.

The resting state has historically been referred to as the default mode, because it has been thought to reflect the dominant mode by which coordinated intrinsic activity ongoing at rest is defaulted to, and to which it returns when attentional demands cease. 8 Despite its regular occurrence, not all minds wander to the same degree; there are stable differences among individuals in the propensity to experience SIT and engage the DMN. 14 , 52 Nevertheless, the reciprocal relationship between the passive task-negative state of rest and the active task-positive states is thought to support two fundamentally different modes of information processing—one serving internally oriented attention and another serving externally oriented attentional demands. The DMN shows the most robust anticorrelation with attentional networks, apparent during externally oriented tasks, suggesting that it is fueling task-negative internally directed functional activity.

The DMN, also described as the hippocampal– cortical memory system, 53 , 54 has most consistently been shown to include the ventral posteromedial cortex (vPMC; including posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) and retrosplenial cortex), ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), posterior inferior parietal lobe (pIPL), hippocampus, and lateral temporal lobe. 36 , 39 , 55 , 56 The DMN has occasionally been reported to also include the dorsomedial/rostromedial PFC (including BA 8, 9, and 10), rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC, or anterior medial PFC), insular cortices, and temporal pole. 52 , 57 , 58 Interestingly, these additional regions have been implicated in task-positive networks and goal-directed activity, suggesting possible overlap of networks with potential functional relevance, and apparent nonstationarity or change over time seen in typical functional connectivity (fc) analyses. 58 Such observations of nonstationarity also suggest a problem with implicating one network supporting a rapidly changing mental state at rest. 47 In fact, some recent work has suggested that the DMN may be broken into multiple subsystems that subserve different dimensions of stimulus-independent or stimulus-oriented mentalizing during the resting state. 52 , 59 , 60

Notably, core DMN regions have been reported to support active states associated with self-reflective, evaluative processes in addition to supporting passive mental states of rest, further suggesting that the resting state involves internally oriented evaluative processing. 36 , 52 , 61 – 63 Self-referential processing involves taking one's self as the object of attention and making judgments or evaluations of one's own thoughts, emotions, or character. 34 , 57 These functional roles have provided the basis for the characterization of the DMN as an evaluative network and has implicated the network in both spontaneous and volitionally mediated mind wandering. 49 The primary nodes of the DMN (PCC and vmPFC) are particularly noteworthy because of their anatomical connections and corresponding functional roles. For example, the vmPFC has direct anatomical connections to the hypothalamus, amygdala, striatum, and brainstem, providing input necessary to process emotion, motivational states, and arousal. 64 Its functional role in coordinating and evaluating basic drives associated with mood, reward, and goal-directed behavior is also strongly supported by the abovementioned anatomy and by its activity in functional brain imaging studies, animal experiments, and behavioral observations in patients with vmPFC lesions. 65 , 66 The PCC is considered to be a network hub with dense anatomical connections across the brain and in particular with the medial temporal lobe, making it and neighboring regions of the vPMC well suited for mediating autobiographical memory retrieval and self-referential processing. 43 , 67 Recent studies have suggested that vPMC activity may be functionally reduced to being “attached to” and “getting caught up in” one's experience, whether it be self- or other-focused, or negatively or positively valenced. 68 In this context, self-reflective processing consumes one's cognitive resources and interferes with ongoing task demands and/or embodied behavior.

A large body of research on the resting state now supports the involvement of the DMN in a diverse array of cognitive processes that are associated with negative or maladaptive mood states, such as rumination, craving, or distraction. 14 , 34 , 68 There is evidence that, in most forms of psychopathology, the DMN is hyperactivated and hyperconnected, showing abnormally high activation during goal-directed tasks. 34 These data suggest that task-dependent downregulation is not as apparent and that patients suffering from psychiatric disorders may be more easily distracted by internal ruminations. 69 Furthermore, greater suppression of the DMN during task performance has been shown to improve accuracy, memory encoding, retrieval, andconsolidation. 70 – 72 Greater DMN activation just prior to a stimulus predicts attentional lapses and decreased accuracy, further providing evidence for its potential role in distraction. 72 However, despite the predominant interpretation that DMN activity is indicative of maladaptive functional processes, this interpretation may be overly simplistic. SIT and associated DMN activity have been characterized by content that is adaptive and constructive. 6 , 57 For example, in healthy individuals, SIT has been shown to facilitate insight, creative problem solving, cognitive control, and prospection for simulating future possible outcomes. 12 , 22 , 73 , 74 The critical point here is that the costs and benefits of DMN activation are context dependent. 14 , 75 Indeed, Smallwood and Andrews-Hanna 14 proposed the context-regulation hypothesis, which states that self-generated thought under conditions that demand continuous attention is unproductive because it can be a source of error, but under nondemanding conditions, it has the potential for benefit.

Although some may argue that there is no apparent functional relationship associated with spontaneous, intrinsic activation of the DMN, an argument can clearly be made claiming the benefit of spontaneous or intentional DMN activation as it reflects our sense of self-identity. DMN activation supports conceptual, linguistic, and symbolic forms of self-representation involving a form of “mental time travel,” which explicitly provides a sense of coherence and continuity with our sense of self in the present moment by allowing one to project representations of self into the future and retrospectively to the past. 14 , 76 Tulving 76 described this mnemonic process involving episodic forms of autobiographical memory as “autonoetic consciousness,” suggesting a conceptual knowing and awareness of self in real time. Tulving and others 77 – 80 argued that this uniquely human ability c provides the necessary cognitive structure for advancing intelligence, building on existing knowledge, discriminating ethical and adaptive behavioral responses to the environment, and “day dreaming” for advanced forms of cognition. One could then imagine that, without opportunities to cultivate autonoetic consciousness, mistakes would be repeated, decisions would be poorly informed, and a sense of identity would be lacking. Mind wandering and the associated DMN activity may, therefore, reflect intrinsic capacities that are necessary to navigate the complex social environment in which humans exist. 14 , 81 Indeed, maintaining a sense of continuity of the self, with reliance on mnemonic processes and DMN activation, contributes to the highest functional and metabolic demands of the brain during waking states.

Mindful awareness: stillness in concentration

From the classical Buddhist Abhidharma perspective, stability and stillness of mind provide freedom from destructive types of emotion and cognition (e.g., anger, craving, greed, lethargy, hyperexcitability) that are rooted in excessive self-absorption or perseveration. 4 , 82 The following metaphor is commonly used to describe how the foundation of mindfulness may contribute to the benefits of a still mind, focusing on cultivating attentional stability and reduced unintentional mind wandering. If a stone is tossed into a still lake, the ripples are clearly visible. Yet, when that lake is unsettled, a single stone's effect is barely noticeable. The same is true of the mind, 83 in that a restless mind that is fraught with many thoughts and emotions is easily distracted, inefficient, and unable to adequately encode information for later retrieval. Furthermore, if one leaves a glass of muddy water still, without moving it, the dirt will settle to the bottom, and the clarity of the water will shine through. Similarly, in mindfulness-based meditation, in which attention is trained to continually return to a single point of concentration, thoughts and emotions settle into what is described as the mind's natural state of stillness, ease, equanimity, and sensory clarity. 3 , 84

In the text Stages of Meditation , an 8th century Indian Buddhist contemplative, Kamalasila describes 10 sequential stages of attention training, referred to as “taming the mind” or “calm abiding” (Pāli: samatha ) that begins with an effortful form of focused attention (FA) and progressively advances toward a state of effortless and objectless awareness. 82 Stability of attention refers to sustained concentration and vigilance that remain unperturbed by distraction or interference from discursive mind wandering, while clarity refers to the phenomenal intensity with which sensory or mental content is experienced. 82 , 85 Insight practice (Pāli: vipassana ), a form of open monitoring (OM) meditation, typically follows calm abiding training with the goal of facilitating meta-awareness of one's own mental habits, increasing the aperture of awareness to all sensory and mental objects that naturally arise and pass. Mindfulness meditation is often taught as an interplay between calm abiding and insight meditation. Therefore, according to the classical Buddhist Abhidharma, one depiction of a restful mind is one that requires concentration, but is calm, alert, and holding an object or stream of objects in effortless awareness.

Although the breath is the most commonly described object of focus in historical Buddhist contexts (e.g., Satipatthāna sutta ), concentration may be on any internal or external sensory object across modalities, the temporal flow of objects arising and passing through space/time, or the restful state where no objects are present ( Table 1 ). One particular contemporary mindfulness system, the Basic Mindfulness system, 86 was developed by Shinzen Young with multiple Buddhist traditions in mind and uses an algorithmic approach that teaches individuals to note and label any experience in three modalities (visual, auditory, or somatic). Sensory objects can be noted and labeled as they arise and pass in OM meditation, or there can be a concentrated focus on one particular modality and experience (i.e., subjective, objective, rest, or flow). A focus on rest is one particular concentration method for cultivating a quiet mind with specificity in each modality, such that absence of the sensory object becomes the object of focus and any impulse to engage with external or internal sensory objects is regulated. Young 86 describes “see rest” as a focus on the “gray-scale blank” with eyes closed or “into image space but not at an image” with eyes open; “hear rest” is described as “mental quiet” or “physical silence” around the practitioner; “feel rest” is referred to as a focus on the “physical relaxation and absence of emotion in one's body.” The different levels of absorption, modalities of concentration, and associated objective neurophysiology have yet to be fully characterized.

Note: The subjective labels “see in,” “hear in,” or “feel in” allow for noting internal sensory experience; “see out,” “hear out,” or “feel out” allow for noting objective sensory experience; “see rest,” “hear rest,” or “feel rest” allow for noting sensory rest; and “see flow,” “hear flow,” or “feel flow” allow for noting the flow of sensory objects across time. 86

Meditative concentration is sometimes referred to as “one-pointedness” (Sanskrit: samādhi) or “absorption” (Pāli: jhāna ). In Tibetan, samādhi is translated as ting nge dzin, where the syllable dzin means “to hold” and the syllable nge is an adverb meaning “to hold something unwaveringly.” The Nikāyas mention variations of samādhi and give descriptions of deepening levels of absorption on the object of attention. Four stages of absorption on form (Sanskrit: rupa jhānas ), four on formless ( arupha jhānas ), and total cessation of perception and feeling ( nirodha-samapatti ) are described in progressive stages of concentration and stillness. At the fourth stage of the rupa jhanas, the mind is focused on a “material” object with equanimity and a narrow aperture of awareness ( Fig. 1 ), such that no other sensory stimuli can enter awareness. By the first formless stage, the meditator achieves insight that there is no longer an object, but rather infinite empty space. The formless states and nondual awareness appear to have similar characteristics, none of which have yet been clearly distinguished in cognitive neuroscience. Stages of jhāna practice have been observed in one functional MRI (fMRI)/electroencephalography (EEG) case study of a long-term Sri Lankan Khema practitioner who was able to progressively move through each of the eight stages of form and formless absorption practice. 87 This study found decreased BOLD activity relative to the resting state and a basic state of concentration (access concentration) across visual, auditory, language, and premotor regions of interest; slight increases in the rACC and ventral striatum; and a shift to lower frequency α and θ bands in EEG. 87 Interestingly, the study suggested that ventral striatal activity corresponds to the subjective experience of joy during early stages. In the historical Hindu context of the yoga suttas, samādhi is believed to represent nondual or transcendent states of conscious awareness and absorption where the sensory or mental object is known directly, beyond name and form, and a feeling of unity or oneness is experienced with the object of meditation. 88 – 91 These descriptions of concentration practice suggest that, through practice and depth of concentration, mental quiet shifts from stable perception of an object to a state of nondual awareness where there is a dissolution of self–object distinctions.

In contemporary contexts, comparisons have been drawn between states of mindfulness in concentration and experiences of “flow,” “the zone,” peak states of performance, and the opposite domain—“zoning out.” Although there are clear similarities of samādhi with states of flow, distinctions can be made. Critically, samādhi is described to involve intentional blocking of sensory information and yet allowing motivationally relevant information to enter conscious awareness. 4 Without volitional control, absorption in an object with focal awareness may also be maladaptive, such that inhibitory processes prevent pertinent sensory information from arising to conscious awareness, potentially leading to an overwhelming sensation and maintenance of emotional reactivity related to the object of focus. 93 Furthermore, the experience of zoning out, as is commonly experienced during a temporally extended, exogenous attentional process that involves low arousal or does not require analytical or critical discernment (e.g., watching television), has also been described as an “intense immersion in the moment;” yet, the individual “typically loses touch with the socially, culturally, and historically constructed world in which he or she lives.” 94 This has been described as “meditation sickness” in Zen traditions that heavily emphasize methods that focus on achieving “inner stillness” over those that engage with the scriptures or discriminate right from wrong in an analytical or critical way 94

Mindful awareness: stillness in nonduality

Later stages of both jhāna and samatha practice place less emphasis on engagement and disengagement with objects of attention and more with nonduality, which refers to the eventual dissolution of subject–object distinctions, nonconceptual awareness, and a phenomenology described as the true nature of mind—an ultimate form of stillness. 82 , 85 Nonduality is most commonly equated with the concept of reflexive awareness (Sanskrit: svasamvitti ) 95 or “bare attention,” coined by the German-born monk Nyanaponika Thera in his book, The Heart of Buddhist Meditation . 3 This nonconceptual emphasis on living in the here and now is believed to have contributed to the foundations of contemporary mindfulness and of the therapeutic recipe for well-being. 94 , 96 In traditional nondual practices of mindfulness (e.g., Chan, Zen, Mahamudra, Dzogchen), 97 there is emphasis on the subject–object distinction as the root of suffering. The Sanskrit author Santideva describes this state of stillness as “remaining like a piece of wood,” such that any impulse toward a particular thought, emotion, or behavior can be heedfully detected but denied full engagement before the mental event requires cognitive resources. 97 , 98 The general instructions for Mahamudra practice are, “Do not chase the past; do not invite the future; rest the awareness occurring now in a clear and nonconceptual state.” 97 There is clear instruction to avoid self-reflective processing and maintain focus in the present; yet, the idea in this practice is not to cultivate a state of samādhi, but rather to release any effort, let go, and not engage with any object. In contrast to the stillness derived from focused concentration, the nondual emphasis is believed to cultivate stillness through an objectless focus. The nondual state has been referred to in Tibetan styles of Dzogchen as “open presence” (Tibetan: rigpa chogzhag ) and also as “awakening” (Pāli: bodhi ) or “nibbana.” Many Buddhist traditions see this as a goal state, where there is a cessation of all “unwholesome” states and all phenomena, including space and time. 99 Understandably, this state of awakening is highly contextualized in the schools of Buddhism from which they are originally described, and there has yet to be objective evidence for the reproducibility of this state. However, the state of open presence has been most closely associated with a nonreferential form of compassion that has been shown to dramatically increase -γ -band activity in advanced meditators across frontal and temporoparietal regions. 100 This activity was also found to correlate very closely with subjective reports of clarity during the practice and remain high in amplitude even after the meditation was complete. 100 γ-Band synchrony is believed to reflect control and temporal binding of local neural activity by distributed neural networks. 101 Theories of attention specify that continuous activation of task-relevant brain areas is driven by high-frequency γ-band activity, and greater magnitude of activity reflects stronger links between attention and sensory inputs. 101 Other neuroimaging experiments on nondual states have demonstrated unique, weak anticorrelations between the attentional networks and the DMN in comparison to stronger anticorrelations during FA practice, suggesting less inhibitory tone over other incoming sensory or mental input. 102 Although both concentration and nondual approaches appear to cultivate stillness in unique ways, the qualitative phenomenology may indeed be similar.

Mindful awareness and discernment versus mind wandering and evaluation

Recently, a number of studies have suggested a therapeutic role of mindfulness-based therapies in neuropsychiatric settings, in which symptoms are reduced explicitly through the reduction of persistent DMN activity and associated narrative self-processing interfering with goal-directed tasks. 103 – 108 This is particularly emphasized in contemporary mindfulness settings where nonconceptual awareness or nonjudgment is emphasized. Indeed, the practice of various styles of mindfulness-based meditation purportedly involve a decrease in self-reflective processing and evaluation. 28 , 30 It is therefore not surprising that, across styles of practice, meditation is found to inhibit activity of nodes within the DMN, similarly to any goal-directed task. 104 , 109 – 114 Furthermore, reports of improved quality of the meditation state 115 or greater meditative experience 116 have been associated with greater decreases in magnitude of activation in primary nodes of the DMN. The PCC, a major node in the DMN, has specifically been targeted for real-time neurofeedback, with the goal of improving one's stability of attention across styles of meditation. 115 , 117 Such results support the idea that meditation practice is undeniably an active cognitive process, and with greater expertise, the magnitude of the inverse correlation with DMN activity becomes greater, 109 suggesting that greater levels of effortless concentration may more robustly reduce activation in the DMN. Generally, one would expect such deactivation of the DMN during any goal-directed task, especially in contrast to a nonmeditative state following instructions to the mind wander 38 or in contrast to a task that specifically recruits self-reflective processing. 118 However, without any explicit instruction to process internal information in a discursive, narrative self-focus, a nonmeditative rest condition may no longer reflect the same mental content, process, or valence for an advanced meditator as in a novice practitioner. In fact, recent data have suggested that meditative expertise may transform the resting state into one that is more similar to a meditative state. 109 , 119 Furthermore, recent studies have demonstrated that spontaneous mind wandering that engages the DMN may still be apparent, but less frequent, during meditation or during nonmeditative states. 105 , 120 Yet, the contrast between a traditional nonmeditative resting state and particular styles of meditation provides considerable insight into the restful mind and how it engages with mental objects with and without awareness.

Although these results appear to suggest that mindfulness is involved in suppressing the DMN and associated self-reflective processing, this interpretation may be an oversimplification for the explanation of meditative expertise. Mindfulness is not merely the opposite of mind wandering, nor is it necessarily always present focused (see Refs. 94 and 96 ). Upon closer inspection of the meaning of mindfulness from the Sanskrit, Pāli, or Tibetan translations, there is a controversial emphasis on cognitive processes “to recollect,” “to bear in mind,” and “to remember.” 2 , 94 , 96 This is in contrast to the typical instruction to stay in the present moment of awareness without judgment. 121 Across schools of Buddhism, two aspects of mindfulness are often described, one in which there exists a nonconceptual state of awareness (Pāli: sati ) and another that involves discernment (Pali: sampajaňňa ), d requiring active reflection, judgment, and action in relation to the sensory or mental objects observed. 2 , 4 In fact, the compound sati-sampajaňňa is often found in the classical Abhidharma or Nikayas to describe a state of mindfulness. 84 Discernment is a cognitive process that reflects continuous access to, and appraisal of, the objects of attention as they arise, so that no thought can be developed into action unchallenged. 2 It facilitates recollection of Dharmic teachings and primes prosocial motivations. It is a process described to help eradicate mental afflictions and motives that potentially affect self-development on a moment-to-moment basis. 122 Without such discernment, the Abhidharma continues to explain that the mind begins to wander toward afflictive thoughts and emotions. Mindfulness and discernment are also described to develop a self- or meta-monitoring faculty that can detect when the goal state of concentration on a particular object has shifted and support a reorientation of attention to the goal-relevant object. This form of meta-awareness implies a nonconceptual, second-order, embodied reflection on experience as a form of experience itself and that is not entangled in the contents of awareness. 123

Given such descriptions, we hypothesize that a state of mindful awareness critically involves rapid flexibility between brain networks that are contextually driven by specific mind states of the practitioner. Building on previous models of mindfulness-based meditation processes, 28 , 30 , 124 we propose that a frontoparietal control network (FPCN) is appropriately situated to couple with, and integrate information across, other contextually relevant networks. The FPCN has the potential to support a volitional focus of stable attention and nonconceptual meta-awareness across bodily systems with a high level of sensory clarity and facilitate rapid discernment and evaluation of each object without strong engagement as mental objects arise and pass in the practitioner's phenomenological space ( Figs. 1 and ​ and3). 3 ). As described by Cole et al. , 45 the FPCN is believed to act as a hub to enhance connectivity between all other RSNs.

Comparison between mind wandering and OM meditation. Evaluative processes and associated DMN activity process visual, auditory, and somatic modalities and inhibit FPCN, VAN, and DAN attentional networks from gaining meta-awareness. The VAN (vlPFC and TPJ) is critical for reorienting, while the DAN (FEF and IPS) is critical for sustaining attention. Mind wandering and OM meditation process the same inputs (visual, auditory, somatic). OM has increased activation of attentional networks and flexible switching between networks. Mind wandering has less connectivity across networks and therefore lacks the meta-awareness to detect unintentional self-reflective or evaluative processing. The FPCN not only acts as a hub for detecting irrelevant mind wandering, but also for facilitating rapid discernment and evaluation when contextually appropriate. Thickness of lines represents proposed strength of connectivity between networks. SMA/PMA, supplementary and premotor areas; IPS, inferior parietal sulcus; pIPL/aIPL, posterior/anterior inferior parietal lobe; PI, posterior insula; AI, anterior insula; dmPFC, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex; vmPFC, ventromedial prefrontal cortex; r/dACC, rostral/ dACC cortex; S1, primary sensory cortex; PCC, posterior cingulate cortex; RSP, retrosplenial cortex; FPCN, frontoparietal control network; VAN, ventral attention network; DAN, dorsal attention network; FEF, frontal eye field; FPC, frontopolar cortex; dlPFC, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex; vlPFC, ventrolateral prefrontal cortex; MT+, middle temporal visual area; TPJ, temporoparietal junction; RSP, retrosplenial cortex; sc, superior colliculus; sgACC, subgenual anterior cingulate cortex; HF, hippocampal formation.

The dorsal attention network(DAN)is associated with externally directed cognition, including covert and overt shifts of attention, eye movements, and hand–eye coordination. 125 It increases in activation at onset of search, maintains activity while awaiting a target, and further increases when targets are detected. 73 , 125 , 126 It is bilaterally represented and includes frontal eye fields (FEFs), ventral premotor cortex, superior parietal lobe, intraparietal sulcus (IPS), and motion-sensitive middle temporal area (MT+). 54 The DAN facilitates orientation in the sense that it is engaged by cues that prime the system for forthcoming stimuli. 126 In contrast, the ventral attention network (VAN) is not engaged by predictive cues and, in fact, is kept under inhibitory control, likely by top-down regions, such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), for the purpose of reducing distraction or allowing unintended information from flooding conscious awareness. 125 The VAN is strongly right-hemisphere dominant and includes the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and ventrolateral PFC (vlPFC) as major nodes. The VAN continues to direct attention to salient and behaviorally relevant sensory stimuli outside the focus of processing maintained by the DAN. 126 The FPCN has been shown to have extensive connectivity with both the DMN and attentional networks (DAN, VAN), supporting the potential to flexibly couple with either network, depending on task demands. 73 The FPCN includes the VAN, nodes of salience (dorsal anterior cin-gulate (dACC) and AIC)) and executive control networks (dlPFC), as well as the anterior inferior parietal lobe (aIPL), frontopolar cortex (FPC), and dmPFC. 54 , 73 Together, this circuit is believed to link sensory representations to motor maps and facilitate the critical meta-awareness function that then engages a circuit breaker for sustained attention and reorientation of attention as new objects arise and pass. 126 Although frontal areas are responsible for voluntary executive control, parietal regions in concert with frontostriatal circuitry are more involved in stimulus–response associations and would likely become more critical as effort decreases. 126 The DAN and VAN may communicate through the FPCN when there is an intention to actively manipulate the information for some purpose. For example, the VAN is critical for semantic retrieval in the context of inhibitory control. 127 Through a relatively short temporal window, it has been proposed that the FPCN may help link active attentional processes associated with sustained vigilance and alerting with the semantic retrieval and reorientation of attention to task-relevant, but currently unattended, stimuli facilitated through the VAN. 126 The FPC takes up a uniquely large volume of space in the human brain, 128 is a critical node of the FPCN, and is thought to be differentially sensitive to changes in demands for stimulus-oriented or stimulus-independent attention along a lateromedial dimension. 74 This may be why this region is sometimes included in the DMN and at other times included with the frontoparietal or executive control network. 52 , 60 , 63 One study observed the recruitment of both rostromedial and lateral FPC during mind wandering with a lack of awareness; whereas, mind wandering with awareness was found to recruit nodes of attentional networks (lateral PFC and dACC) in addition to the PCC/precuneus, TPJ, insula, and temporal pole, suggesting a processing overlap that could account for poor task performance. 63 Yet, future research will have to clarify whether this type of retrospective experience-sampling method represents a form of nonconceptual meta-awareness that is likely in meditative practice or meta-cognition to involve some level of “mental stickiness” and contributes to distraction and future planning.

Although some methodological challenges remain in interpreting some of the existing initial findings for network interactions (see Ref. 31 ), recent cross-sectional fc studies of meditators have generally demonstrated increased connectivity between the two main nodes of the DMN (PCC and vmPFC) and between nodes of the DMN and salience and executive networks during a nonmeditative resting state. 109 , 111 , 114 , 129 – 132 These studies reflect changes that are sustained in nonmeditative states. In a small number of studies, increased fc has been found between DMN nodes and task-positive regions (e.g., dACC, dlPFC) during and across styles of meditation practice ( Fig. 3 ). Although some of the methodological discrepancies are difficult to interpret, these preliminary studies support the hypothetical flexible switching between networks and the potential functional relevance between nonconceptual awareness and discernment.

There is now evidence to suggest that the FPCN may be actively recruited through both OM and FA meditative practice. 133 – 135 Recent meta-analyses of both morphometric and functional neuroimaging studies of FA and OM have demonstrated increased size and activity in regions of the brain associated with the FPCN (FPC, dACC, dmPFC, dlPFC), areas also associated with the salience and executive networks. 133 , 135 Parts of the DMN (PCC, pIPL) have been shown to decrease in activity during OM and FA mindfulness–based practices. 134 , 135 These data suggest mindful awareness may not only contribute to a quiet mind embedded in concentration, but may also be critical for allowing individuals to flexibly switch between externally and internally driven processes in a volitional manner, drawing from inner reflection and focusing externally with more control than a control population. 30

Thus, a more nuanced reflection on the state of mindfulness, especially in the context of OM meditation, demonstrates significant similarities, and an interaction, with a state of mind wandering. Both mind wandering and OM meditation involve attentional orientation to mental objects arising and passing with each moment ( Fig. 1 ). Yet, subtle differences in attentional engagement, task relevance, emotional reactivity, and perceptual clarity determine the extent to which each state, and the content associated with each state, contributes adaptively (or not) to current mood or future behavior. In the context of OM meditation, 30 , 124 , 136 thoughts or emotions may arise, but the practitioner is typically instructed to refrain from engaging purposely with the content and to rather remain a witness as a nonattached observer to the content as it arises and passes without any form of appraisal. Such attentional processing will reduce cognitive elaboration and, thus, increase the speed at which one may disengage from objects of attention or reduce mental stickiness—a concept often described in contemporary mindfulness 137 , 138 as a disengagement deficit, more often found in SIT, and as a natural tendency to dedicate resources to an object of attention, such that few resources remain to capture any other pertinent environmental information until one is able to disengage and reorient. Over time, this form of mental stickiness on particular emotional stimuli can become habitual, contextually dependent, and highly automatized into the sensory–affective– motor scripts and schemas that dictate tendencies toward behavior. 139 – 141

There is some evidence suggesting that intensive training in meditation techniques reduces mental stickiness by enhancing monitoring of attention, 142 increasing a distributed attentional focus, 143 – 145 enhancing speed of attention allocation, engagement, and subsequent disengagement from serially presented objects of attention. 146 One of the best examples of this decrease in stickiness, or faster disengagement, in the extant meditation literature is shown by data from an attentional blink task 147 by practitioners who completed 3 months of intensive meditation training. 146 A smaller attentional blink and reduced brain-resource allocation to an object of attention (the first target) were found, as reflected by a smaller target 1 (T1)-elicited P3b, a brain-potential index of resource allocation peaking around 300–450 ms ( Fig. 4 ). 146 Those individuals with the largest decrease in brain-resource allocation to T1 generally showed the greatest reduction in attentional-blink size, and improved detection of T2. These observations provide strong support for the view that the ability to accurately identify T2 depends on the efficient deployment of resources to T1. Such data are also suggestive of reduced elaborative processing in the context of goal-directed activity. It should be clear that this process of discernment and evaluation may be operating below conscious awareness, at the level of nonconscious perceptual processing—an aspect of attentional filtering that has previously been described as a potential source for affective and attentional bias. 29 , 148 , 149

Brain potentials from electrode Pz, time-locked to T1 onset on short-interval trials (220–440 ms) as a function of session, T2 accuracy, and group. Selective reduction in T1-elicited P3b amplitude in no-blink trials is evident in meditation practitioners. Adapted, with permission, from Slagter et al. 146

In this article, we illustrated how the phenomenology of a restful mind can take adaptive or maladaptive forms that are context and content dependent. A sense of peace and quiet in the mind is proposed to arise through mental training in concentration, nonconceptuality, and discernment, in contrast to the untrained frenetic restlessness of mental time travel that is characteristic of daily activity in the postmodern setting. The frenetic resting state and associated brain network dynamics are believed to help scaffold attention and emotion throughout everyday waking life, but with the potential to interfere with cognitive performance, mood, and affect when mind wandering occurs in the context of cognitive demand. Mindfulness-based meditation is often viewed as the antidote for mind wandering, positing an overly simplistic polarization of mind wandering as bad and mindfulness as good. However, building on existing efforts to introduce a more nuanced perspective on the relationship between mindfulness and mind wandering, 32 we describe a potential neurocognitive framework in which mental training associated with mindfulness allows the practitioner to more skillfully gain volitional control, flexibility, and awareness over mind wandering, evaluation, and associated DMN activity without necessarily suppressing or avoiding the flow of mental content. Considering the functional role and dynamics between RSNs is complex, and, thus, the exact role played by the DMN and other attentional networks is likely to be context specific and modulated by the specific practices in which an individual engages. As a function of the situational demands, the FPCN is specifically proposed to rapidly and flexibly couple with the DMN and other attentional networks for contextually appropriate engagement and disengagement with relevant objects in the ongoing stream of mental and sensory content. Thus, a sense of tranquility or stillness of mind involves the elimination of distortions and distractions in an effortless and sustained form of awareness and can have lasting effects on one's mental habits, biases, and worldview in relation to the surrounding world. It is likely that a highly developed meta-awareness in the context of mindfulness-based practice may offer a key mechanism for rapid discernment of what is relevant at early stages of attentional processing while also providing sensory clarity and emotional stability through each moment of experience.

Unfortunately, there is a particular rhetoric surrounding the emphasis of nonconceptuality, nonjudgment, and present-moment focus that continues to lead to ethical, social, and developmental passivity in the contemporary mindfulness movement. Given the secular emphasis of mindfulness on the present moment, there is regrettably less emphasis on the benefits from an efficient ability to draw consciously from past experiences and the capacity to reflect inwardly. On closer inspection of the state of mindfulness, we discuss here the benefits of judgment, evaluation, conceptuality, and DMN activity to provide a more nuanced description of brain network interactions and the benefits delivered by these meditation techniques that are continuing to emerge in contemporary society. More broadly, these skills are not emphasized for personal gain, but rather to ultimately nurture the human connection and sense of meaning and purpose that provides the foundation for the benefits of realizing stillness.

Although the current theoretical analysis remains speculative, continued consideration of the resting state in comparison to meditation practice is likely to reveal specialized insights into brain function, energy metabolism, conscious awareness, and therapeutic relevance for psychiatric conditions. Future research investigating differences between FA and OM practices may help clarify critical differences between focal and ambient awareness, and the ability for individuals to volitionally modulate types of information that enter awareness through engagement and disengagement processes. Other considerations for future research should include tracking phenomenology using qualitative empathetic interviewing skills 150 with explicit second-person methods built into the neuroimaging studies, in addition to correlating first-person reports with third-person measures of brain activity. This method could involve independent, unbiased interviewers who may help participants explicate their experiences in order to direct them toward phenomenological aspects of their experience and away from theorizing about it. Examining the stability of RSNs across meditation states, axiological frameworks, and across a phenomenology of clarity and mind wandering, may better reflect consistent therapeutic targets that are context specific. More consistency across fc analyses will have to involve choosing consistent seeds for analyses and tracking functional changes across states and rest in both clinical samples and meditation-naive subjects who do not have a self-selection bias. As research progresses in this field, it is likely that differences between novice and advanced meditators will become apparent and may account for discrepancies in the ability to sustain/maintain nonconceptual forms of awareness during meditation and the speed with which practitioners can make discerning judgments. Indeed, even the greatest meditators report fluctuations in level of clarity with which meditative quality is experienced over time. Thus, future research would benefit from having closer measurements of neurophysiological changes as they directly relate to first-person reports on phenomenology of experiences, such as clarity in the context of meditation and throughout daily life.

Acknowledgments

The authors express gratitude to A.P. for the constructive feedback. F.Z. and D.R.V. wrote the paper.

a Eliot, T.S. 1943. Burnt Norton. Four Quartets. Orlando: Harcourt.

b Early schools of Theravada Buddhism describe a collection of scriptures and suttas in the Pāli Canon.

c Although Tulving argues that mental time travel is uniquely human, there is good evidence to suggest that scrub jays can cache food in a manner that reflects both planning for the future and some form of mental time travel to retrieve detailed information on when and where the food was cached. 79

d Sampajaňňa is also described in nondual traditions as a form of “monitoring,” rather than “clear comprehension” in Theravadan texts. Thus, this aspect of mindfulness may reflect a state of meta-awareness, decentering, or dereification that reflects an interaction between task-set retention and background awareness. 97

Conflicts of interest : The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Why Mind Wandering Can Be So Miserable, According to Happiness Experts

We still don’t know why our minds seem so determined to exit the present moment, but researchers have a few ideas

Libby Copeland

For you, it could be the drive home on the freeway in stop-and-go traffic, a run without headphones or the time it takes to brush your teeth. It’s the place where you’re completely alone with your thoughts—and it’s terrifying. For me, it’s the shower.

The shower is where I’m barraged with all the “what-ifs,” the imagined catastrophes, the endless to-do list. To avoid them, I’ve tried everything from shower radio and podcasts to taking a bath so I can watch an iPad. I’ve always thought this shower-dread was just my own neurosis. But psychological research is shedding insight into why our minds tend to wander without our consent—and why it can be so unpleasant.

Scientists, being scientists, sometimes refer to the experience of mind-wandering as “stimulus-independent thought.” But by any name, you know it: It’s the experience of arriving at work with no memory of the commute. When you’re engaged in mundane activities that require little attention, your brain drifts off like a balloon escaping a child’s hand—traveling to the future, ruminating on the past, generating to-do lists, regrets and daydreams. 

In the last 15 years, the science of mind wandering has mushroomed as a topic of scholarly study, thanks in part to advances in brain imaging. But for a long time, it was still difficult to see what people’s brains were doing outside the lab. Then, when smartphones came on the scene in the late 2000s, researchers came up with an ingenious approach to understanding just how often the human brain wanders in the wilds of modern life.

As it turns out, our brains are wily, wild things, and what they do when we’re not paying attention has major implications for our happiness. 

In 2010, Matt Killingsworth, then a doctoral student in the lab of happiness researcher Daniel Gilbert at Harvard University, designed an iPhone app that pinged people throughout the day, asking what they were experiencing at that very moment. The app asked questions like these, as paraphrased by Killingsworth:

1. How do you feel, on a scale ranging from very bad to very good?

2. What are you doing (on a list of 22 different activities, including things like eating, working and watching TV)?

3. Are you thinking about something other than what you're currently doing?

Killingsworth and Gilbert tested their app on a few thousand subjects to find that people’s minds tended to wander 47 percent of the time. Looking at 22 common daily activities including working, shopping and exercising, they found that people’s minds wandered the least during sex (10 percent of the time) and the most during grooming activities (65 percent of the time)—including taking a shower. In fact, the shower appears to be especially prone to mind wandering because it requires relatively little thought compared to something like cooking.

Equally intriguing to researchers was the effect of all that mind wandering on people’s moods: Overall, people were less happy when their minds wandered. Neutral and negative thoughts seemed to make them less happy than being in the moment, and pleasant thoughts made them no happier. Even when people were engaged in an activity they said they didn’t like—commuting, for example—they were happier when focused on the commute than when their minds strayed.

What’s more, people’s negative moods appeared to be the result, rather than the cause, of the mind wandering. Recently, I asked Killingsworth why he thought mind wandering made people unhappy. “When our mind wanders, I think it really blunts the enjoyment of what it is that were doing,” he told me.

For most, the shower in and of itself is not an unpleasant experience. But any pleasure we might derive from the tactile experience of the hot water is muted, because our minds are elsewhere. Even when our thoughts meander to pleasant things, like an upcoming vacation, Killingsworth says the imagined pleasure is far less vivid and enjoyable than the real thing.

Plus, in daily life we rarely encounter situations so bad that we really need the mental escape that mind wandering provides. More often, we’re daydreaming away the quotidian details that make up a life. “I’ve failed to find any objective circumstances so bad that when people are in their heads they’re actually feeling better,” Killingsworth told me. “In every case they’re actually surprisingly happier being in that moment , on average.”

When I told Killingsworth I spend my time in the shower imagining catastrophes, he wasn't surprised. More than a quarter of our mental meanderings are to unpleasant topics, he’s found. And the vast majority of our musings are focused on the future, rather than the past. For our ancestors, that ability to imagine and plan for upcoming dangers must have been adaptive, he says. Today, it might help us plan for looming deadlines and sources of workplace conflict.

But taken to an extreme in modern day life, it can be a hell of an impediment. “The reality is, most of the things we’re worrying about are not so dangerous,” he said.

In some cases, mind wandering does serve a purpose. Our minds might “scan the internal or external environment for things coming up we may have to deal with,” says Claire Zedelius , a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California at Santa Barbara who works in the lab of mind wandering expert Jonathan Schooler . Mind wandering may also be linked to certain kinds of creativity , and in particular to a creativity “incubation period” during which our minds are busy coming up with ideas, Schooler’s lab has found. 

It’s unclear how our tendency to drift is affected by the diversions and distractions of our smartphones. As Killingsworth pointed out, all those distractions—podcasts, email, texts and even happiness trackers—may mean we’re effectively mind wandering less. But it may also be that “our capacity to direct our attention for sustained periods gets diminished, so that then when we’re in a situation that’s not completely engaging, maybe we have a greater propensity to start mind wandering.”

I took up mindfulness meditation a few years ago, a practice which has made me much more aware of how I’m complicit in my own distress. For about 15 minutes most days, I sit in a chair and focus on the feeling of my breath, directing myself back to the physical sensation when my mind flits away. This has helped me notice how where I go when I mind wander—away from the moment, toward imagined future catastrophes that can’t be solved.

Cortland Dahl , who studies the neuroscience of mind wandering and has been meditating for 25 years, told me that he was six months into daily meditation practice when he witnessed a change in the way he related to the present moment. “I noticed I just started to enjoy things I didn’t enjoy before,” like standing in line, or sitting in traffic, he says. “My own mind became interesting, and I had something to do—‘Okay, back to the breath.’” Killingsworth’s findings help explain this, said Dahl, a research scientist at University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Healthy Minds.

“We tend to think of suffering as being due to a circumstance or a thing that’s happening—like, we’re physically in pain,” he says. “And I think what this research points to is that oftentimes, it’s not actually due to that circumstance but much more to the way we relate to that.”

Killingsworth is still gathering data through Trackyourhappiness.org , which now has data from more than 100,000 people, and he plans to publish more papers based on his findings. He says the lesson he’s taken from his research so far is that we human beings spend lots of time and effort fixing the wrong problem. “A lot of us spend a lot of time trying to optimize the objective reality of our lives,” he told me. “But we don’t spend a lot of time and effort trying to optimize where our minds go.”

A few months ago, I decided to try mindful showering. If I could observe the mental script and divert myself back to breath during meditation, I figured, perhaps I could divert myself back to the present moment while washing my hair. Each time I do it, there’s a brief moment of dread when I step into the shower without a podcast playing. Then, I start to pay attention. I try to notice one thing each time, whether it’s the goose bumps that rise when the hot water first hits, or the false urgency of the thoughts that still come. They demand I follow them, but they’re almost always riddles that can’t be solved.

The trick is in recognizing the illusion— ah yes, there’s that ridiculous clown car of anxiety coming down the road again. The saving grace, when I can manage to focus, is the present moment. 

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When the Mind Wanders, Happiness Also Strays

By John Tierney

• Nov. 15, 2010

A quick experiment. Before proceeding to the next paragraph, let your mind wander wherever it wants to go. Close your eyes for a few seconds, starting ... now.

And now, welcome back for the hypothesis of our experiment: Wherever your mind went — the South Seas, your job, your lunch, your unpaid bills — that daydreaming is not likely to make you as happy as focusing intensely on the rest of this column will.

I’m not sure I believe this prediction, but I can assure you it is based on an enormous amount of daydreaming cataloged in the current issue of Science . Using an iPhone app called trackyourhappiness , psychologists at Harvard contacted people around the world at random intervals to ask how they were feeling, what they were doing and what they were thinking.

The least surprising finding, based on a quarter-million responses from more than 2,200 people, was that the happiest people in the world were the ones in the midst of enjoying sex. Or at least they were enjoying it until the iPhone interrupted.

The researchers are not sure how many of them stopped to pick up the phone and how many waited until afterward to respond. Nor, unfortunately, is there any way to gauge what thoughts — happy, unhappy, murderous — went through their partners’ minds when they tried to resume.

When asked to rate their feelings on a scale of 0 to 100, with 100 being “very good,” the people having sex gave an average rating of 90. That was a good 15 points higher than the next-best activity, exercising, which was followed closely by conversation, listening to music, taking a walk, eating, praying and meditating, cooking, shopping, taking care of one’s children and reading. Near the bottom of the list were personal grooming, commuting and working.

When asked their thoughts, the people in flagrante were models of concentration: only 10 percent of the time did their thoughts stray from their endeavors. But when people were doing anything else, their minds wandered at least 30 percent of the time, and as much as 65 percent of the time (recorded during moments of personal grooming, clearly a less than scintillating enterprise).

On average throughout all the quarter-million responses, minds were wandering 47 percent of the time. That figure surprised the researchers, Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert .

“I find it kind of weird now to look down a crowded street and realize that half the people aren’t really there,” Dr. Gilbert says.

You might suppose that if people’s minds wander while they’re having fun, then those stray thoughts are liable to be about something pleasant — and that was indeed the case with those happy campers having sex. But for the other 99.5 percent of the people, there was no correlation between the joy of the activity and the pleasantness of their thoughts.

“Even if you’re doing something that’s really enjoyable,” Mr. Killingsworth says, “that doesn’t seem to protect against negative thoughts. The rate of mind-wandering is lower for more enjoyable activities, but when people wander they are just as likely to wander toward negative thoughts.”

Whatever people were doing, whether it was having sex or reading or shopping, they tended to be happier if they focused on the activity instead of thinking about something else. In fact, whether and where their minds wandered was a better predictor of happiness than what they were doing.

“If you ask people to imagine winning the lottery,” Dr. Gilbert says, “they typically talk about the things they would do — ‘I’d go to Italy, I’d buy a boat, I’d lay on the beach’ — and they rarely mention the things they would think . But our data suggest that the location of the body is much less important than the location of the mind, and that the former has surprisingly little influence on the latter. The heart goes where the head takes it, and neither cares much about the whereabouts of the feet.”

Still, even if people are less happy when their minds wander, which causes which? Could the mind-wandering be a consequence rather than a cause of unhappiness?

To investigate cause and effect, the Harvard psychologists compared each person’s moods and thoughts as the day went on. They found that if someone’s mind wandered at, say, 10 in the morning, then at 10:15 that person was likely to be less happy than at 10 , perhaps because of those stray thoughts. But if people were in a bad mood at 10, they weren’t more likely to be worrying or daydreaming at 10:15.

“We see evidence for mind-wandering causing unhappiness, but no evidence for unhappiness causing mind-wandering,” Mr. Killingsworth says.

This result may disappoint daydreamers, but it’s in keeping with the religious and philosophical admonitions to “Be Here Now,” as the yogi Ram Dass titled his 1971 book. The phrase later became the title of a George Harrison song warning that “a mind that likes to wander ’round the corner is an unwise mind.”

What psychologists call “flow” — immersing your mind fully in activity — has long been advocated by nonpsychologists. “Life is not long,” Samuel Johnson said, “and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent.” Henry Ford was more blunt: “Idleness warps the mind.” The iPhone results jibe nicely with one of the favorite sayings of William F. Buckley Jr.: “Industry is the enemy of melancholy.”

Alternatively, you could interpret the iPhone data as support for the philosophical dictum of Bobby McFerrin : “Don’t worry, be happy.” The unhappiness produced by mind-wandering was largely a result of the episodes involving “unpleasant” topics. Such stray thoughts made people more miserable than commuting or working or any other activity.

But the people having stray thoughts on “neutral” topics ranked only a little below the overall average in happiness. And the ones daydreaming about “pleasant” topics were actually a bit above the average, although not quite as happy as the people whose minds were not wandering.

There are times, of course, when unpleasant thoughts are the most useful thoughts. “Happiness in the moment is not the only reason to do something,” says Jonathan Schooler , a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research has shown that mind-wandering can lead people to creative solutions of problems, which could make them happier in the long term.

Over the several months of the iPhone study, though, the more frequent mind-wanderers remained less happy than the rest, and the moral — at least for the short-term — seems to be: you stray, you pay. So if you’ve been able to stay focused to the end of this column, perhaps you’re happier than when you daydreamed at the beginning. If not, you can go back to daydreaming starting...now.

Or you could try focusing on something else that is now, at long last, scientifically guaranteed to improve your mood. Just make sure you turn the phone off.

A Harvard Medical School professor with ADHD shares how he retrained his brain for deep work and reached peak productivity

• Dr. Jeffrey Karp grew up with undiagnosed ADHD, struggling to focus and answer questions in class.
• Using two tactics to retrain his brain, Karp gained confidence and pursued a career in academia. 
• The MIT and Harvard professor shares the benefits of working in a flow state in his new book .

As a professor at Harvard Medical School and MIT, I am very lucky; I get to learn from and collaborate with some of the most innovative minds in the world of medicine, science, and technology. But I was not "supposed" to be here. No one would have predicted this for me.

Growing up with undiagnosed ADHD

When I was a kid in elementary school in rural Canada, I had the attention span of a fruit fly, and I struggled to keep up. Reading, writing, classroom discussion, and teachers' instruction — I couldn't make sense of any of it.

It wasn't just that I was distractible and my brain didn't process things in a conventional way; my mind felt completely open to just existing in the world, in a constant mind meld with the universe. It took a ton of effort for me to narrow my focus so stuff could enter, stick, and stay.

And I was an anxious kid. I couldn't relax and just be myself, feel okay as "the quirky kid" because I felt like something worse than that: an alien, a human anomaly. I realized early on that there were many things I was "supposed" to do, but none of them came naturally or seemed logical.

More troubling still was that much of it didn't feel like the right thing to do; it felt actively wrong. When a teacher asked me a question, whether on a test or in class, I typically found the question confusing and often unanswerable. The "right" answer seemed like just one of many possibilities. So, most of my school years were an exercise in trying to figure out, interpret, and fit others' expectations.

I was a puzzle for my teachers, a misfit in the conventional academic sense, and a total outcast socially. Today, with society's much greater understanding of ADHD, part of my eventual diagnosis, there are evidence-based approaches for building self-regulation skills designed for kids (and adults). But at that time and in that place, the only option was to wing it.

Sea slugs were essential in helping me retrain my brain

Over the years, I slowly gained motivation and became more persistent. I didn't know it at the time but my evolution as a learner mirrored the two fundamental concepts of how neurons change and grow — how they learn — that the neuroscientist Eric Kandel would someday identify as the basis that sea slugs and humans have in common for learning and memory: habituation and sensitization in response to repeated exposure to stimuli.

Habituation means that we become less reactive to stimuli, as you might to traffic noise outside your window. Sensitization means that our reaction is stronger, as happens when, for instance, a sound or a smell or even the thought of something becomes a trigger.

Living my own experiment, I learned to make use of both.

I discovered some basic ways to work with my brain to habituate to some stimuli (ordinary things that distracted me) and sensitize (sharpen my attention) to others to be able to reel in my wandering mind and redirect the synaptic messaging with intention. At one point, in the room where I studied there was a pinball machine next to me and a TV behind me. I learned to ignore both and used playing the pinball machine as a reward for finishing my homework.

Over time I became hyperaware of how to intentionally hijack processes in my brain this way to be less reactive or more sharply focused as needed.

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The result: I was able to focus on what seemed most purposeful, then follow through and maximize impact as opportunities opened up. I tinkered and fine-tuned until I learned how to use these powerful tools to tap into the heightened state of awareness and deep engagement that I call "lit."

What is 'lit' focus

I call it "lit" for two reasons. First, "lit" aptly describes how the flash of inspiration feels—as if a bright light flipped on in the dark. Or a spark has set your thinking ablaze. When you've had an epiphany, been awestruck, or simply been super excited, you've felt that spark. Second, "lit" is how these moments appear to the scientists who study them. Inside the brain (and in the gut as well), engaged states activate neurons. In the brain, this triggers an increase in cerebral blood flow that neuroscientists can see when they use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

On a monitor, this oxygenated blood lights up an otherwise gray image of the brain with yellow-orange hot spots of activity. Emerging science shows that this neural activation is associated not only with particular cognitive activity or emotions such as fear and anger but also with love, awe, happiness, fun, and "peak states," or flow.

In "lit" mode, we engage at the highest level of our abilities. We not only develop the mental muscles to stay focused, but we also build the confidence and the dexterity to riff off of new information on the fly.

We're more likely to use our critical thinking skills, which can keep us from blindly accepting what we're told, or told to believe, especially when our intuition says otherwise. We find it easier to connect with people, are more alive to the possibilities all around us, and are better able to capitalize upon them. In a stream of ever-replenishing energy, we're constantly learning, growing, creating, and iterating. We're building our capacity while doing our best work.

As I honed strategies that enabled me to activate my brain this way at will, I identified a dozen that were simple to use and never failed to open my thinking in just the way that was needed, whatever that was.

Whether it was to direct my attention or disrupt it, sharpen my focus or broaden it, do something stimulating or quiet my mind, these Life Ignition Tools (LIT) worked for me, and then for others as I shared them.

Practicing habits that let me access deep work has been integral to my success

Once I learned how to work with my neuroatypical, voraciously curious, but chaotic brain, I discovered infinite opportunity to question, create, and innovate as a bioengineer and entrepreneur on a global scale and help others do the same. These LIT tools took me from being a confused and frustrated kid, sidelined in a special ed classroom in rural Canada, to becoming a bioengineer and medical innovator elected a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering's College of Fellows, the Biomedical Engineering Society, and the Canadian Academy of Engineering.

As a professor, I've trained more than 200 people, many of whom are now professors at institutions around the world and innovators in industry; published 130 peer-reviewed papers with more than 30,000 citations; and obtained more than a hundred issued or pending national and international patents. The tools also helped me cofound 12 companies with products on the market or in development.

And finally, they've been instrumental in creating a productive, supportive, and dynamic high-energy environment in my lab, which recently morphed from Karp Lab to the Center for Accelerated Medical Innovation.

Having specific tools helped a struggling kid like me

LIT worked for this kid who appeared to show no promise and the young man who remained frustrated and discouraged for many years. Though I still struggle every day in various ways, I'm grateful to be able to say that these LIT tools enabled me to meet and far exceed those dismal early expectations.

If we want breakthroughs in science and medicine, if we want successful, disruptive innovations on all fronts to support healthier communities, and if we want to cut through the noise and focus on what is most important, we must learn how to use all of the tools in nature's playbook, our evolutionary arsenal. We must shake up our thinking — not just now and then but on a daily basis.

In practice, LIT tools make it possible for us to take anything we're hardwired for — including undesirable or unhelpful behaviors and habits — and with intention, channel the energy in them to create a positive outcome. It's easier than you might think because the more you do it, the greater the rewards, the momentum, and your impact for good.

You're never too old to charge your brain this way, and most definitely no one is ever too young. In fact, LIT tools can be lifesavers for kids, as they were for me.

Adapted from LIT: Use Nature's Playbook to Energize Your Brain, Spark Ideas, and Ignite Action by Jeff Karp, PhD, published by William Morrow. Copyright © 2024 by Jeffrey Michael Karp. Reprinted courtesy of HarperCollinsPublishers.

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