Any monkey will tell you laboratory tests are repetitive, mundane, an environment ripe for mind wandering. If your aim is to better understand why we daydream, the laboratory should be the perfect setting. But can we rely on laboratory experiments to explain how these internal distractions limit our ability to focus on day-to-day events in the real world?
Professor Michael J. Kane is the first to address that question in a National Institutes of Health-funded study, recently published in Psychological Science. He and his colleagues equipped a large sample of students with a device that would prompt them randomly with a series of questions about what they were just thinking about and what they were doing.
“We wanted to better understand what cognitive and personality factors influence how often people are mind wandering in everyday life,” says Kane. In the lab and the field, he found we seldom concentrate on the task at hand. Our minds wander a lot, on average a third of the time.
Scientists have just begun to investigate the purpose of our regular drift in focus. Over the past decade, results from laboratory experiments and brain scans have revealed the mechanisms and neural networks associated with a wandering mind. They show that while it feels like our brain is getting a break when we daydream, it’s actually quite active, processing memories for long-term storage or working through complex problems.
Kane’s interest in mind wandering derived from a desire to better understand the relationship between attention and intelligence. On average a subject’s mind wanders at a rate of 30 percent, but he was struck by the variability around that average. “We regularly have people say they were mind wandering only once or twice a week,” he says. “Whereas other students were off-task 80, 90 percent of the time.” Kane wondered if differences in cognitive ability, specifically in working memory, might be a factor.
