Feel free to post questions you have about mind-wandering, whether in relation to your personal experience or scientific research questions.
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Mind-wandering is a product of spontaneous, internally generated thought
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Hi
I have lost my daydreaming after taking anti-psychotic drug (olanzapine) only for two months and my daydreaming has not returned for 4 years.living without daydreaming is too boring and it is very annoying.it is like living in hell.I have stopped the drugs for years but it didnt help me.Is there any way to increase and strengthen daydreaming?
thanks
Hi Reza,
Our studies indicate that daydreaming is easily disrupted by events in the outside world. Perhaps you will find it easier to daydream if you make sure that the possibility for disruption is reduced as far as possible.
Jonny
I would say daydreaming fills the majority of my time especially when alone. In what ways is daydreaming most useful? Here’s my similar yet different odd question for today. What kind of careers and businesses benefit the most from daydreamers.
Hi Morpheus
Our studies show that daydreaming does fill almost all of the idle moments that people have. Although it is hard to pin down the main advantages that daydreaming brings, we now know that most often people are thinking about the future (the goals that they have yet to complete and the hopes and dreams of the future). We think that a main feature of daydreaming, therefore, is it affords the opportunity to engage in what we call autobiographical planning, so any profession that such a skill was useful would be good for a daydreamer!
Hope that helps
Jonny
Hi,
I am doing a project on doodling, in what way do you think mind wandering relates to doodling?
Hi Alex.
There is a great paper called: What does doodling do? by Jackie Andrade in Applied Psychology – you should check it out if you haven’t already done so. Doodling may be a lot like mind-wandering; both are probably a form of entertainment when we are otherwise unoccupied. Although instead of being internally focused (as daydreaming often is) doodling is externally focused. This may in principle help to keep attention focused on the outside environment so that we don’t miss things (like when we are in a relatively boring but important meeting). Daydreaming or mind-wandering does the opposite – they make people worse at attending to the outside world and can lead to absent minded forgetting
I hope this helps.
Jonny
Thanks, I have had email contact with Jackie who has given me her full report. She was the one you told me about you. Again the feedback was very helpful thanks.
Great. I am glad to have been of help. If there is anything else, just let me know.
Jonny
I’m sure that a “wondering mind” is the disability I have. Even sleep at night, I never get a restful night sleep! I live on the verge of exhaustion. I have asked Doctors for 50 years for help and all I get are anti Depression drugs that never help and the side effects make me worse. If I can get a good night sleep, I can control my wondering thoughts, but it is impossible to get a restful sleep. Tried sleep Labs and Allergy treatments to clear sinus, nothing helps. Can you offer any help, please!!
Professor Smallwood is a expert in wandering mind, but maybe not an expert therapist on wondering mind. Hence, please try to find a related therapist.
Hope this can give you some help.
I always thought I was distracted when people would come to me and say “hey, these days you don’t say hello!” I always tell them that I have things to do and I am very focus on this things. Is it mind-wandering?
As far as I concerned, wandering mind means that you are not focusing on the present task. Since you are focusing on your present tasks and forgetting to say “Hello”to somebody, which you always did before you are very busy , this seems the problems on you changed your habit. Thus, you are not mind-wandering.Of course, you deed have made others confused, you’d better explain the reason to them. Thus they would not feel confused again.
Best wishes.
Hi There
I am currently researching zoning out and mind wandering in relation to caffeine cravings and nicotine cravings. Would you say that caffeine cravings would cause more instances of mind wandering?
Thanks
Sami x
Hi Sami
Perhaps the easiest way to think about this is that mind wandering often entails thoughts that do not have an external perceptual referent at the moment the thought occurs. The precise term for this is stimulus independent thought. So in the case of smoking, cravings that result from watching someone else smoke would not be stimulus independent but if the same thought was generated internally it would be. Hope this helps,
Jonny
Hello,
I’m a psychology student and I’m writing an article about the connection between mind wandering and EPQ-R personality dimensions. And I have w great problem, becuse it is very difficult to find any information about in on line (I’m trying for two weeks…). Could you help me? Do you know about any existing researches connected with my topic?
Thank you for any help.
Kasia.
Ps. Sorry for my poor english, I’m from Poland.
Hi Kasia
I am not aware of any studies that have been done on mind-wandering and the EPQ dimensions. The closest thing I am aware of is the work that has looked at states as depression and its relationship to mind wandering. I think it would be a really worthwhile question to look at the relationship between mind wandering and personality. Good luck
Jonny
Hi,
I’m a psychology student and I’m doing a seminar about daydreaming and creativity… Do you know where can I find a complete daydreaming tendency/frequency questionnaire?
Hi Chen
There is an instrument called the Imaginal Processes Inventory which can be found online. This has various questionnaires that measure daydreaming propensity etc… and would be useful for your seminar. I have used it in a couple of behavioral studies as has Malia Mason in an fMRI study.
Best
Jonny
hi, may I ask you if you think if there are any differences between daydreaming and mind-wandering? are they synonymous or they have two different meanings?
many many thanks!
Hi Alessandro,
The relation between mind wandering and daydreaming is very complex and is at the heart of one of the most interesting debates in this research area. One the one hand, both seem to involve similar neural process, on the other our experience suggests that we daydream when we have free time, while we mind wander at moments when we are engaged in another task. At present there is no clear answer, but I think that we will have a better idea in the future.
Jonny
Dear Jonny,
thank you for answering! I’m doing some research on the topic and your answer is enlightening,
Alessandro
Hi Allessandro,
Glad to be of help. You might want to read the paper: Why the global availability of mind wandering necessitates resource competition” which can be downloaded from this website. In this article, I discuss whether the context in which mind wandering/daydreaming occurs is important in understanding how to understand the similarities and differences in the two concepts.
Jonny
Dear Professor Jonny,
Where is available for the Dundee Stress State Quesionnaire (DSSQ) with 16-item which you also used in your study? Could please send it to me?
Many thanks.
Jane
Hi Jane
See my answer to Meagan above.
Best
Jonny
Hi, I want to know if Mind Wandering is possible while a person is reading a coffee table book since he is bored waiting for a long time in the hospital queue. I also want to know if the graphical contents of the coffee table book that he is reading could become his environment or surroundings while Mind Wandering.
Hi Amogh
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
Hi,
I am a graduate student and am working on a project where we would like to investigate mind wandering in middle school students–do you know of an appropriate measure for this? Thanks for your help!
Meagan
Hi Meagan,
I am in the process of trying to track down the authors to see if I can upload it on to my web site. Stay tuned.
Best
Jonny
Hi,
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
Hi Jonny,
it seems quite clear to me that while “mind-wandering” can sometimes be viewed as a lapse of attention, it may be more usefully imagined as simply an attentional shift from external sensory inputs to internal signals. The many important mental activities such as remembering or planning that could be defined as SITs or TUTs or both indicate to me that a wandering mind may instead be conceived as a by-product of an essential system.
I was wondering if you are aware of any research examining attentional systems and their interaction with internally directed thought? Perhaps some overlap between systems directing the reorientation of attention to relevant external stimuli and analogous systems related to relevant internal processes?
Specifically I have in mind the ventral network discussed in Corbetta et al 2008.
Excited to hear your thoughts on this.
Hi Nick
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
Hi Gonzo,
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
Thanks for the in depth response! Much appreciated Jonny.
~N
No problem. If you have any questions after reading those papers let me know
Jonny
My question is in regards to what I’ve coined “fake-fighting”…these are daydreams characterized by re-imagining “winning” any form of real conflict (ranging from arguments or physical altercations that have occurred in which the imaginer either “lost” or conflict came to a stalemate), or imagined conflict (escalating an ongoing argument or altercation to the point of producing an imagined “win”). I wonder if this is a form of coping with being too passive/aggressive?
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-
Hi
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