I am a graduate student particularly interested in the way mind wandering can persist despite the presence of highly salient and behaviourally relevant external stimuli. Perhaps a typical example of this is the mind wandering that people often report while driving a car. This can involve traveling at a dangerous speed and making quick life-preserving decisions, but simultaneously being completely “decoupled” from the world. To my knowledge, much of the research on mind wandering involves relatively tedious tasks/stimuli that are nowhere near as complex as driving a car (forgive my ignorance if this is incorrect). Are there any good examples from laboratory experiments that illustrate how mind wandering persists in the face of salient external events that have a substantial survival/threat value?

Kind regards, and thanks for your very thought provoking work.

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