One of the things we have discovered in the last year or so is that mind wandering when it is associated with events that have already happened is quite common and is partly related to having had some kind of unhappy event in the recent past. I cover this in a post on this website called “Imprisoned by the Past” and along with a co-author Rory O’COnnor published a paper on this aspect of mind wandering this year in a journal called Cognition and Emotion. I think that the phenomenon is likely to be quite common and probably quite adaptive: possibly the most important function that mind wandering serves in general is to help people make sense of what has happened so that in the future they can deal with it in a more productive manner.

Hope that this makes sense.

Jonny

I’ve found that I experience these types of daydreams constantly and have introduced a process of immediately ceasing the daydream as well as internally recognizing a “Fake-fight” is occurring.

I’m interested to know whether you’ve come across in your research any sort of value (or more likely) impediments that mind wandering of this type may provide/create?

Thank you-

Jonny

There is no published evidence that mind-wandering and creativity are linked, although we are currently looking into this in a series of experiments. As you might expect there is a lot of introspective and anecdotal evidence along these lines. stay tuned to this website and when we get a firm answer on the topic I will post about it.

Best

Jonny

I completely agree that mind wandering can sometimes be viewed is a shift in attention to an internal train of thought, and there are a number of sources of evidence from our studies for this idea. In our 2009 PNAS paper we demonstrated that the neural recruitment that occurs during mind wandering can engage systems that are traditionally viewed as important in maintaining and controlling attention (or at least working memory) such as the dLPFC and the inferior frontal gyrus. The latter observation was replicated by a study in PLOS One this year from Arnaud D’Argeambeau’s group in Liege. In a forthcoming paper in Consciousness and cognition we have followed up this observation with a demonstration that individuals with better attentional control do more future related mind wandering in a simple external task (Baird et al., 2011 Consciousness and Cognition). Along these lines I would recommend that you look at the work of Nathan Spreng and Kathy Gerlach (both in Dan Schacters Group at Harvard) who are doing some great work on future planning which is a big part of the mind wandering state.

More recently, we showed in a paper in Psych Science this year (Barron et al., 2011) that those people who mind wander in a three stimulus odd ball task have less amplitude in the ERP responses to the distracter stimulus (as you are probably aware a reduction in distracter processing is a hall mark of attentional control. Along the same lines we have demonstrated that in general situations that do not require external attention and allow internal focus generally do not show the same degree of physiological coupling to the external stimulus (Smallwood et al., 2011, PLOS ONE). These are all evidence for what we call the decoupling hypothesis which essentially suggests that attention has the property that it can be decoupled from perception and can instead focus on internally generated information (see my Review in Brain Research this year for a possible neural architecture for this idea).

Hope this helps

Jonny

I was wondering, if there is a connection between mind wandering and creativity. Sometimes, when I have to solve a problem, the solution comes into my mind while I am not aware of the outer world. What would you say could be the connection between mind wandering and creative ideas? What could mediate ist?

thanks,

Gonzo

See my answer to Meagan above.

Best

Jonny

If I understand your question correctly, yes it is possible to mind wander while reading a book while waiting in a queue. As to whether they can mind-wander about the graphical content, I think this is related to the questions as to whether people think in words or images. No one has done the experiment yet to answer this question yet, although I think the answer would be important.

Hope this helps,

Jonny