In the last couple of weeks a number of studies that explore the darker side of mind-wandering have been published. For example, recently a study in the British Medical Journal it was shown that mind-wandering was a cause of automobile accidents (http://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/18/Suppl_1/A200.2.short).  In a quasi-experiment with almost 1000 participants, the authors demonstrated that mind-wandering, especially with a highly disturbing content, was a significant predictor of errors. This study highlights the dangers that can arise from too much mind-wandering. Along the same lines, in a study published in the journal Clinical Psychological Science, Epel and colleagues examined telomere length in relation to the amount of mind-wandering a person experienced (http://cpx.sagepub.com/content/1/1/75.short). Teleomere length is a proximal measure for aging, and the authors analysed data from 239 women for whom mind-wandering was also measured.  Individuals who reported the most mind-wandering (defined as not being fully engaged in the moment coupled with a feeling that you did not want to be where they were doing what they are doing) had the shortest telomere lengths. This line of evidence suggests that individuals who mind-wander are likely to live shorter than those who do not.

Together these data suggest that the prognosis for someone who mind wanders is not good: if you are lucky enough not to crash your car, you will be unlikely to live to a ripe old age. As you read about these studies you may have thought: Hey! I mind wander a lot this is not good news. This observation should illustrate something strange about the results of these studies: If most people worry that they mind-wander too much shouldn’t most people have a car crash, or die relatively young?  According to the NY times the likelihood of having a fatal car crash is 1 in 84 (http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/31/how-scared-should-we-be/) whereas according to the most comprehensive survey of mind-wandering data, based on experience sampling data collected from almost 2000 subjects, most people are mind-wandering almost half of the time (http://www.sciencemag.org/content/330/6006/932.abstract). Fortunately, most car accidents do not lead to a fatality; nonetheless there seems to be something out of whack with these statistics. If everyone mind wandered half of the time it seems intuitively that the risk of death by car accident would be higher. Likewise, it seems statistically unlikely that a behavior that most people do can lead them to live shorter lives: length of life is defined normatively in reference to a population and so any influence that is endemic in a population would lower the overall age of the population. This would make it hard for mind-wandering to reduce the length of someone’s life.  Setting these statistical irregularities aside, these studies are also hard to reconcile with the observations associating self-generated thought with capacities such as creativity as well as the ability to delay gratification that I covered in an earlier blog  (http://themindwanders.com/2012/12/01/productive-daydreaming/).

How can we then make sense of these data? One answer is that just as there is not one shoe that fits every foot, there is not one type of mind-wandering.  Although, the authors of both experiments used different definitions of the experience, they focused on elements of mind-wandering that are intuitively bad: especially distracting or negative episodes. Some people limit their daydreams to situations and they often do well in daily life; others probably have mind-wandering episodes with quite optimistic content. As the capacity to self-generate thought allows the mind to cover as many topics as it can imagine (literally) it seems that it is not mind-wandering per se that we should be focused on when trying to improve health and well-being; Rather if we want to be happy we should care what we mind-wander about. If we don’t want to have an accident we should try not to do it when operating heavy machinery or other activities that a lapse in focus can lead to calamitous consequences. So a careful consideration of this research suggests that it may not be as bleak for mind wanders as at first glance. Unless your mind-wandering is highly distracting you will probably be less likely to have a car crash than these experiments suggest, while if your mind-wandering is not negative in tone this may not compromise your chances of living to a ripe old age.

In a couple of papers published over the last few months my co-authors and I have demonstrated that the capacity to disengage attention from an easy task is associated with two of the most important human skills: the capacity to solve problems in a creative fashion and the ability to delay gratification.  In one study, conducted in collaboration with Ben Baird, Jonathan Schooler and others we examined how the state of perceptual decoupling was associated with making progress on a problem (http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/08/31/0956797612446024.abstract ). Participants were given a number of everyday objects (such as a brick) and were asked to generate as many uses for them as possible. After doing this task for a few minutes, participants were allocated to one of several conditions: a ten minute rest break, a ten minute working memory task, or an easy choice reaction time task with the same duration. A fourth group simply moved onto the next phase of the experiment. Next participants were asked to go back to the same creativity problems as well as to solve another set of matched problems.  The results suggested that daydreamers in general performed better on the creativity problems.  In addition, those participants who performed the choice reaction time task generated more creative solutions to the old problems. As we already know that perceptual decoupling is taking place during the choice reaction time task (http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0018298e) this result suggests that disengaging from the external environment may be important in pursuing a line of thought that is creative.

In a second study, conducted with one of my graduate students Florence Ruby, as well as Professor Tania Singer from the Max Planck Institute, Leipzig, we examined how the same state of mental disengagement in the same tasks is linked to our capacity to delay gratification (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810012002097). Being able to delay gratification reflects our capacity to refrain from accepting a smaller reward in the present in favor of gaining a larger reward in the future. Delaying gratification is important in skills like saving and dieting and so not surprisingly people who are better at this task are often the same as those who do well at school, maintain a healthy diet and have better credit ratings.  In this study, participants performed both the easy and the hard tasks used in the creativity study and we measured an individuals tendency to delay gratification in a common economic decision-making paradigm.  Results demonstrated that participants who generated more task unrelated thoughts in the easy task made more patient temporal choices. Engaging in task unrelated thought in the hard task was not related to delay gratification. This result suggests that the ability to decouple attention from perception when external tasks are not especially demanding is a characteristic of individuals have who tend to make decisions that benefit them over the long run and so avoid making rash choices.

The capacity to be creative and to make decisions that are beneficial over long time frames are two of the most important skills that we as a species possess.  Together they allow us to generate novel solutions to problems and to have the presence of mind to make sure that we stick to these plans for long enough to ensure that we achieve our goals.  Our research is demonstrating that both of these skills are related to our ability to decouple attention from external information and focus on self-generated thoughts and feelings when the environment is not demanding. Rather than being an absent minded lapse or a moment of idle fancy, it seems that the capacity to disengage from the outside world when the external environment is sufficiently benign reflects a skillset that is important to almost every human endeavor.

In a second study conducted with colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara, we investigated how this process relates to the content of off task episodes. In this experiment published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition we demonstrated that the same measure of working memory capacity was predictive of off task thoughts about the future but not about the past. Further analysis indicated that the content of these thoughts took the form of autobiographical plans that the individuals have about upcoming events, such as going to the gym or romantic dates. This result suggests that the motivation for using working memory to support daydreaming or mind-wandering maybe to make progress on the pressing goals that form the backdrop of our lives.

Together these experiments suggest that the process of working memory helps support the mental content that our minds generate when we daydream.  Moreover, when we are engaged on an undemanding task (such as washing the dishes or riding on the bus) we use these idle resources in attempts to make progress in the problems and concerns that we all have as we navigate through daily life.  Whether using working memory in this fashion is necessarily the best tactic for a healthy balanced life remains to be seen.  However, as the capacity for working memory is important in educational achievement and predicts success in the workplace, the association with mind-wandering implies that daydreaming in non-demanding tasks is a part of the mental life of those people who tend to be successful in modern life.

For discussions of this in the popular press see:

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/11/daydreaming-is-a-downer.html?rss=1

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19715-iphone-app-reveals-the-emotional-downside-of-daydreams.html)