I’m going to give you a test. Try to read this entire blog entry without having your mind wander off at all. Odds are — and these odds are pretty long at that — you won’t be able to do it.
Even though you might understand that letting your mind wander would be a bad thing, that you know you need to pay attention, you mind will wander. Scientists have been looking into this, oddly enough. I guess they’re worried that people aren’t focusing on them quite enough. That’s probably why they wear those white lab coats. It makes them look spiffy and we have to pay attention.
Whoops. Sorry about that. I drifted away for a bit there. It happens sometimes.
Anyway, it turns out there are two kinds of mind wandering. One is when you’re aware you’re thinking about something else and the other — called zoning out — is when you’re not even aware that you’re not focused on the task at hand.
The researchers put people in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner and gave them the standard press-a-key-unless-you-see-three test. From time to time they asked the subjects if they were paying attention to the task; if they hadn’t been, the researchers asked if they had been aware that their mind had wandered. The subjects reported mind wandering 43 percent of the time they were asked. In nearly half those cases, they said they hadn’t been aware of their inattentiveness until the scientists asked.
Later, the scientists pored over the scans, looking closely at the activity in people’s brains right before they were asked about their state of mind. Overall, people who said they were mind wandering had a pattern of brain activity quite different from those who were focused on the task.
The regions of the brain that become active during mind wandering belong to two important networks. One is known as the executive control system. Located mainly in the front of the brain, these regions exert a top-down influence on our conscious and unconscious thought, directing the brain’s activity toward important goals. The other regions belong to another network called the default network. In 2001 a group led by neuroscientist Marcus Raichle at Washington University discovered that this network was more active when people were simply sitting idly in a brain scanner than when they were asked to perform a particular task. The default network also becomes active during certain kinds of self-referential thinking, such as reflecting on personal experiences or picturing yourself in the future.
Of course, there’s always the possibility that zoning out is good for you. Probably everyone has had that experience when you can’t remember the name of the person who starred in that thing, you know that movie the other guy was in. You think and you think and you think, but you just can’t remember. You manage to push the thought out of your mind and go make a sandwich. Halfway through the peanut butter, you remember the name.
There are many stories in the history of science of great discoveries occurring to people out of the blue. The French mathematician Henri Poincaré once wrote about how he struggled for two weeks with a difficult mathematical proof. He set it aside to take a bus to a geology conference, and the moment he stepped on the bus, the solution came to him. It is possible that mind wandering led him to the solution. John Kounios of Drexel University and his colleagues have done brain scans that capture the moment when people have a sudden insight that lets them solve a word puzzle. Many of the regions that become active during those creative flashes belong to the default network and the executive control system as well.
Now if we could just learn to harness this to make our little dudes a little more attentive to not paying attention.
– Richard
Tags: All Odds, Blog Entry, Brain, Brain Activity, Brains, dude, Executive Control, Freaky Friday, Freaky Friday, Functional Magnetic Resonance, Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Inattentiveness, little dude, little dudes, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Man, men, mom, movie, Paying Attention, Peanut Butter, Press A Key, Regions Of The Brain, research, Researcher, richard, Scanner, science, Scientist, Scientists, Two Kinds, White Lab Coats, Whoops