harvard research on mind wandering

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Harvard psychologists Matthew A. Killingsworth (right) and Daniel T. Gilbert (left) used a special “track your happiness” iPhone app to gather research. The results: We spend at least half our time thinking about something other than our immediate surroundings, and most of this daydreaming doesn’t make us happy.

Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer

Wandering mind not a happy mind

Steve Bradt

Harvard Staff Writer

About 47% of waking hours spent thinking about what isn’t going on

People spend 46.9 percent of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they’re doing, and this mind-wandering typically makes them unhappy. So says a study that used an iPhone Web app to gather 250,000 data points on subjects’ thoughts, feelings, and actions as they went about their lives.

The research, by psychologists Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert of Harvard University, is described this week in the journal Science .

“A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind,” Killingsworth and Gilbert write. “The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost.”

Unlike other animals, humans spend a lot of time thinking about what isn’t going on around them: contemplating events that happened in the past, might happen in the future, or may never happen at all. Indeed, mind-wandering appears to be the human brain’s default mode of operation.

To track this behavior, Killingsworth developed an iPhone app that contacted 2,250 volunteers at random intervals to ask how happy they were, what they were currently doing, and whether they were thinking about their current activity or about something else that was pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant.

Subjects could choose from 22 general activities, such as walking, eating, shopping, and watching television. On average, respondents reported that their minds were wandering 46.9 percent of time, and no less than 30 percent of the time during every activity except making love.

“Mind-wandering appears ubiquitous across all activities,” says Killingsworth, a doctoral student in psychology at Harvard. “This study shows that our mental lives are pervaded, to a remarkable degree, by the nonpresent.”

Killingsworth and Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, found that people were happiest when making love, exercising, or engaging in conversation. They were least happy when resting, working, or using a home computer.

“Mind-wandering is an excellent predictor of people’s happiness,” Killingsworth says. “In fact, how often our minds leave the present and where they tend to go is a better predictor of our happiness than the activities in which we are engaged.”

The researchers estimated that only 4.6 percent of a person’s happiness in a given moment was attributable to the specific activity he or she was doing, whereas a person’s mind-wandering status accounted for about 10.8 percent of his or her happiness.

Time-lag analyses conducted by the researchers suggested that their subjects’ mind-wandering was generally the cause, not the consequence, of their unhappiness.

“Many philosophical and religious traditions teach that happiness is to be found by living in the moment, and practitioners are trained to resist mind wandering and to ‘be here now,’” Killingsworth and Gilbert note in Science. “These traditions suggest that a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.”

This new research, the authors say, suggests that these traditions are right.

Killingsworth and Gilbert’s 2,250 subjects in this study ranged in age from 18 to 88, representing a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds and occupations. Seventy-four percent of study participants were American.

More than 5,000 people are now using the iPhone Web app .

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The brain on silent: mind wandering, mindful awareness, and states of mental tranquility

David r. vago.

1 Functional Neuroimaging Laboratory, Brigham & Women's Hospital and Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts

Fadel Zeidan

2 Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy, Wake Forest School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, North Carolina

Mind wandering and mindfulness are often described as divergent mental states with opposing effects on cognitive performance and mental health. Spontaneous mind wandering is typically associated with self-reflective states that contribute to negative processing of the past, worrying/fantasizing about the future, and disruption of primary task performance. On the other hand, mindful awareness is frequently described as a focus on present sensory input without cognitive elaboration or emotional reactivity, and is associated with improved task performance and decreased stress-related symptomology. Unfortunately, such distinctions fail to acknowledge similarities and interactions between the two states. Instead of an inverse relationship between mindfulness and mind wandering, a more nuanced characterization of mindfulness may involve skillful toggling back and forth between conceptual and nonconceptual processes and networks supporting each state, to meet the contextually specified demands of the situation. In this article, we present a theoretical analysis and plausible neurocognitive framework of the restful mind, in which we attempt to clarify potentially adaptive contributions of both mind wandering and mindful awareness through the lens of the extant neurocognitive literature on intrinsic network activity, meditation, and emerging descriptions of stillness and nonduality. A neurophenomenological approach to probing modality-specific forms of concentration and nonconceptual awareness is presented that may improve our understanding of the resting state. Implications for future research are discussed.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. –T.S. Eliot a

Introduction

What are the phenomenological characteristics of a restful mind? With eyes closed, removed from external distraction, a state of wakeful relaxation may easily be cultivated. Yet, left to its musings, it is common for the mind to experience a relentless stream of evaluative thoughts, emotions, or feelings without much effort. “Monkey mind” is a metaphor for the mind's natural tendency to be restless— jumping from one thought or feeling to another, as a monkey swings from limb to limb. Given the heavy demand of modern life on cognitive load, managing the onslaught of ongoing sensory and mental events throughout daily life and improving efficiency of mental processing is of high concern. Tranquility and stillness of mind, as described in the Buddhist Nikāyas , b are believed to reflect a natural settling of thoughts and emotions, in which there is stability of attention, sensory clarity, and equanimity of affect and behavior. 1 This state is believed to develop through systematic mental training involving a combination of concentration, nonconceptual observation, and discernment. 2 – 4

Although the majority of research on brain function has focused on task-evoked activity, current research focusing on the task-unrelated resting mind–brain is beginning to reveal the critical importance of this largely ignored part of human life. Since the advent of neurophysiological recording, it has been determined that the brain is never truly resting. Hans Berger first observed that all states of wakefulness and sleep reveal a spectrum of mixed amplitudes and frequencies of electrical activity that does not cease. According to thought-sampling studies during mind wandering, 5 – 7 the content of the restless mind is often incredibly rich and self-relevant, characterized by spontaneous thoughts and emotions concerned with the past and hopes, fears, and fantasies about the future, often including interpersonal feelings, unfulfilled goals, unresolved challenges, and intrusive memories. With respect to cost and benefit, research on the “resting state” is demonstrating how task-unrelated or stimulus-independent thought (SIT) may adaptively organize brain function 8 and how the intrinsic neural activity supporting SIT affects brain metabolism and neuroplasticity. 8 – 11 Although there are certainly benefits to having access to the rich landscape of spontaneous thoughts for the purpose of creative incubation, 7 , 12 problem solving, 6 and goal setting, 13 an inability to focus attention in the face of irrelevant distraction by such thoughts can be problematic. Unfortunately, humans have been shown to experience this intrinsic undercurrent of spontaneous, self-generated thought during ongoing task demands as a form of interference, distraction, or rumination approximately 50% of each waking day. 5 , 14 SIT often interferes with the ability to remain externally vigilant, 15 , 16 remain focused or concentrate on the task at hand, 16 properly encode external information, 17 listen, 18 perform, 16 , 19 or even sleep. 20 In addition to the apparent inefficiency that SIT contributes to daily life, there is now a large literature linking a majority of self-generated thought to negatively valenced content and negative mood states, 21 , 22 future unhappiness, 5 and the maintenance of psychopathology, such as generalized anxiety disorder 23 – 25 or major depressive disorder. 26 , 27 Most recently, there has been interest in exploring how particular forms of mental training that include a state of mindful awareness allow individuals to change the relationship with the resting state and experience the stream of stimulus-independent mental content in an adaptive way. 28 – 30

Mindfulness and mind wandering are often described as two divergent mental states; 31 , 32 yet, both are frequently referenced in the context of mental rest. There is a subtle difference in both awareness and engagement with the flow of mental objects that may determine the adaptive or maladaptive nature by which the mental content influences one's current mood and future behavior ( Fig. 1 ). Currently, there is great interest in better understanding the neural mechanisms that support resting-state dynamics, states of mindful awareness, and their respective contributions to mood and cognition (see Refs. 31 and 32 ). In this article, we examine a more nuanced perspective on particular mental states that reflect “rest,” mental quiet, stimulus independence, and the neurobiological and physiological circuitry supporting the various flavors of what may constitute a “restful mind.” Occasionally, references are made to the historical Buddhist literature for the purpose of exploring an epistemology of mind as it relates to contemporary secular adaptations of the construct mindfulness.

Variations in awareness during meditation and mind-wandering rest. Visual (V), auditory (A), and somatic (S) modalities of experience are depicted. Awareness in the present moment is depicted by the blue band around mental objects arising and passing through time. Width of the band represents the temporal focus of awareness. The more temporally extended awareness is in time, the more mental stickiness and disengagement delays are apparent. Wider bands refer to difficulty disengaging from mental or sensory objects, greater projection into past or future experience, and a resulting smaller aperture. FA meditation focuses on only one mental/physical object in experience (somatic object is depicted here). All modalities of experience enter awareness in OM meditation and mind wandering (MW). Variations in qualities of object orientation (engagement/disengagement), clarity, and aperture in experience are depicted. These three qualities are represented, respectively, by the width of the circles for each mental object, brightness of the fill color, and diameter of the ring of awareness that sits in the present moment of time. Adept meditators are believed to experience higher clarity (phenomenal intensity) in both forms of meditation, whereas MW is believed to represent low clarity or dullness. Low object orientation or engagement represents less mental stickiness and rapid disengagement, leaving available more cognitive resources. Aperture (scope of awareness) is believed to be intentionally narrow for a concentration practice and high for OM practice. In MW, the spotlight of attention is typically narrow and unintentional because of increased engagement with each mental object; resources are subsequently depleted. Adapted, with permission, from Farb et al. 27 and Lutz et al. 124 See Lutz et al. 124 for more extensive descriptions of clarity and aperture, as well as for other potential experiential descriptors relevant to mindfulness.

The (not-so) resting state: mind wandering, evaluation, and self-referential processing

The resting state is commonly referred to as the baseline state of mind in quietly awake individuals and in the context of no particular task. Given its task-negative orientation, the resting state has been used as a functional contrast for most active task-positive conditions in functional neuroimaging studies. 33 , 34 In fact, this state has been used as a control or baseline condition against conditions of interest in an overwhelming number of neuroimaging studies, since such methods were introduced in the early 1980s. 33 The instructions for this passive baseline state are frequently given in some variation of, “let your mind freely wander without thinking of anything in particular,” “relax,” or “stay still and do nothing,” and involve either eyes opened or closed; however, to avoid the occurrence of sleep, many protocols have encouraged the use of open eyes, with (and without) a fixation cross as a visual stimulus on which to rest one's eyes.

Interest in the resting state has mostly reflected the interest in the methodological function by which to probe spontaneous low-frequency (<0.1 Hz) blood oxygen level–dependent (BOLD) fluctuations (LFBF) that demonstrate consistent spatially and temporally coherent connectivity among large-scale functional brain networks. 35 – 38 Across each of the variations in the above-mentioned instructions, there is robust consistency in detection of these networks, suggesting that low-level physiological noise, task load (fixation), eye movement, or the presence of visual input cannot influence the results. 39 Furthermore, these large-scale intrinsic resting-state networks (RSNs) appear to reflect a fundamental aspect of the brain's organization and are consistently apparent across waking states, including task performance, sleep, 40 and even general anesthesia. 41 At least 10 organized RSNs have been identified during rest, including the default mode network (DMN; Fig. 2 ), with each one reflecting specific functions that cohere to the intrinsic connectivity patterns (i.e., language, attention, executive functioning, salience, sensorimotor activity, or mind wandering). 42 – 45

RSN partition and global fc variability of other networks with the frontoparietal network (FPN). (A) Shown is the network partition of 264 putative functional regions in 10 major RSNs identified at rest through independent component analysis. (B) The connectivity between the FPN and all other RSNs and associated mean variable connectivity are shown. The FPN is believed to act as a hub to enhance connectivity between all other RSNs. Adapted, with permission, from Cole et al. 45

A critical consideration in the interpretation of spontaneous LFBF is the extent to which it is due to specific functional behavior or mentation. There is evidence that varied mental content during the resting time period can modulate functional activity across RSNs, suggesting content has an effect on functional variations in LFBF. 46 , 47 This would seem plausible given that people are engaged in unconstrained mind wandering while laying quietly awake in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner, with a variety of mental content to account for low-level task activation. 47 Yet, there are a number of arguments 38 supporting the idea that mentation during mind wandering is unlikely to be the dominant source of LFBF. 38 Nevertheless, task relevance is often difficult to determine with SIT, unless it is in direct contrast to some attentionally demanding task. Mental content during mind wandering may indeed be of critical importance to task-related processing (e.g., memory consolidation, prospection) or to other ongoing processes that are fundamental to self-specificity. 14 , 48 , 49 Spontaneous fluctuations found in RSNs are believed to be regulated differently than task- or stimulus-driven brain activity. One popular theory holds that the intrinsic activity from LFBF may be more closely related to long-range coordination of higher frequency electrical activity that facilitates coordination and organization of information processing across several spatiotemporal ranges. 50 , 51 Metabolic demands at rest also do not suggest a strong correlation with cellular activity; 8 , 10 , 51 yet, the resting state does not reflect a zero-activity physiological baseline from which attention manifests.

The resting state has historically been referred to as the default mode, because it has been thought to reflect the dominant mode by which coordinated intrinsic activity ongoing at rest is defaulted to, and to which it returns when attentional demands cease. 8 Despite its regular occurrence, not all minds wander to the same degree; there are stable differences among individuals in the propensity to experience SIT and engage the DMN. 14 , 52 Nevertheless, the reciprocal relationship between the passive task-negative state of rest and the active task-positive states is thought to support two fundamentally different modes of information processing—one serving internally oriented attention and another serving externally oriented attentional demands. The DMN shows the most robust anticorrelation with attentional networks, apparent during externally oriented tasks, suggesting that it is fueling task-negative internally directed functional activity.

The DMN, also described as the hippocampal– cortical memory system, 53 , 54 has most consistently been shown to include the ventral posteromedial cortex (vPMC; including posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) and retrosplenial cortex), ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), posterior inferior parietal lobe (pIPL), hippocampus, and lateral temporal lobe. 36 , 39 , 55 , 56 The DMN has occasionally been reported to also include the dorsomedial/rostromedial PFC (including BA 8, 9, and 10), rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC, or anterior medial PFC), insular cortices, and temporal pole. 52 , 57 , 58 Interestingly, these additional regions have been implicated in task-positive networks and goal-directed activity, suggesting possible overlap of networks with potential functional relevance, and apparent nonstationarity or change over time seen in typical functional connectivity (fc) analyses. 58 Such observations of nonstationarity also suggest a problem with implicating one network supporting a rapidly changing mental state at rest. 47 In fact, some recent work has suggested that the DMN may be broken into multiple subsystems that subserve different dimensions of stimulus-independent or stimulus-oriented mentalizing during the resting state. 52 , 59 , 60

Notably, core DMN regions have been reported to support active states associated with self-reflective, evaluative processes in addition to supporting passive mental states of rest, further suggesting that the resting state involves internally oriented evaluative processing. 36 , 52 , 61 – 63 Self-referential processing involves taking one's self as the object of attention and making judgments or evaluations of one's own thoughts, emotions, or character. 34 , 57 These functional roles have provided the basis for the characterization of the DMN as an evaluative network and has implicated the network in both spontaneous and volitionally mediated mind wandering. 49 The primary nodes of the DMN (PCC and vmPFC) are particularly noteworthy because of their anatomical connections and corresponding functional roles. For example, the vmPFC has direct anatomical connections to the hypothalamus, amygdala, striatum, and brainstem, providing input necessary to process emotion, motivational states, and arousal. 64 Its functional role in coordinating and evaluating basic drives associated with mood, reward, and goal-directed behavior is also strongly supported by the abovementioned anatomy and by its activity in functional brain imaging studies, animal experiments, and behavioral observations in patients with vmPFC lesions. 65 , 66 The PCC is considered to be a network hub with dense anatomical connections across the brain and in particular with the medial temporal lobe, making it and neighboring regions of the vPMC well suited for mediating autobiographical memory retrieval and self-referential processing. 43 , 67 Recent studies have suggested that vPMC activity may be functionally reduced to being “attached to” and “getting caught up in” one's experience, whether it be self- or other-focused, or negatively or positively valenced. 68 In this context, self-reflective processing consumes one's cognitive resources and interferes with ongoing task demands and/or embodied behavior.

A large body of research on the resting state now supports the involvement of the DMN in a diverse array of cognitive processes that are associated with negative or maladaptive mood states, such as rumination, craving, or distraction. 14 , 34 , 68 There is evidence that, in most forms of psychopathology, the DMN is hyperactivated and hyperconnected, showing abnormally high activation during goal-directed tasks. 34 These data suggest that task-dependent downregulation is not as apparent and that patients suffering from psychiatric disorders may be more easily distracted by internal ruminations. 69 Furthermore, greater suppression of the DMN during task performance has been shown to improve accuracy, memory encoding, retrieval, andconsolidation. 70 – 72 Greater DMN activation just prior to a stimulus predicts attentional lapses and decreased accuracy, further providing evidence for its potential role in distraction. 72 However, despite the predominant interpretation that DMN activity is indicative of maladaptive functional processes, this interpretation may be overly simplistic. SIT and associated DMN activity have been characterized by content that is adaptive and constructive. 6 , 57 For example, in healthy individuals, SIT has been shown to facilitate insight, creative problem solving, cognitive control, and prospection for simulating future possible outcomes. 12 , 22 , 73 , 74 The critical point here is that the costs and benefits of DMN activation are context dependent. 14 , 75 Indeed, Smallwood and Andrews-Hanna 14 proposed the context-regulation hypothesis, which states that self-generated thought under conditions that demand continuous attention is unproductive because it can be a source of error, but under nondemanding conditions, it has the potential for benefit.

Although some may argue that there is no apparent functional relationship associated with spontaneous, intrinsic activation of the DMN, an argument can clearly be made claiming the benefit of spontaneous or intentional DMN activation as it reflects our sense of self-identity. DMN activation supports conceptual, linguistic, and symbolic forms of self-representation involving a form of “mental time travel,” which explicitly provides a sense of coherence and continuity with our sense of self in the present moment by allowing one to project representations of self into the future and retrospectively to the past. 14 , 76 Tulving 76 described this mnemonic process involving episodic forms of autobiographical memory as “autonoetic consciousness,” suggesting a conceptual knowing and awareness of self in real time. Tulving and others 77 – 80 argued that this uniquely human ability c provides the necessary cognitive structure for advancing intelligence, building on existing knowledge, discriminating ethical and adaptive behavioral responses to the environment, and “day dreaming” for advanced forms of cognition. One could then imagine that, without opportunities to cultivate autonoetic consciousness, mistakes would be repeated, decisions would be poorly informed, and a sense of identity would be lacking. Mind wandering and the associated DMN activity may, therefore, reflect intrinsic capacities that are necessary to navigate the complex social environment in which humans exist. 14 , 81 Indeed, maintaining a sense of continuity of the self, with reliance on mnemonic processes and DMN activation, contributes to the highest functional and metabolic demands of the brain during waking states.

Mindful awareness: stillness in concentration

From the classical Buddhist Abhidharma perspective, stability and stillness of mind provide freedom from destructive types of emotion and cognition (e.g., anger, craving, greed, lethargy, hyperexcitability) that are rooted in excessive self-absorption or perseveration. 4 , 82 The following metaphor is commonly used to describe how the foundation of mindfulness may contribute to the benefits of a still mind, focusing on cultivating attentional stability and reduced unintentional mind wandering. If a stone is tossed into a still lake, the ripples are clearly visible. Yet, when that lake is unsettled, a single stone's effect is barely noticeable. The same is true of the mind, 83 in that a restless mind that is fraught with many thoughts and emotions is easily distracted, inefficient, and unable to adequately encode information for later retrieval. Furthermore, if one leaves a glass of muddy water still, without moving it, the dirt will settle to the bottom, and the clarity of the water will shine through. Similarly, in mindfulness-based meditation, in which attention is trained to continually return to a single point of concentration, thoughts and emotions settle into what is described as the mind's natural state of stillness, ease, equanimity, and sensory clarity. 3 , 84

In the text Stages of Meditation , an 8th century Indian Buddhist contemplative, Kamalasila describes 10 sequential stages of attention training, referred to as “taming the mind” or “calm abiding” (Pāli: samatha ) that begins with an effortful form of focused attention (FA) and progressively advances toward a state of effortless and objectless awareness. 82 Stability of attention refers to sustained concentration and vigilance that remain unperturbed by distraction or interference from discursive mind wandering, while clarity refers to the phenomenal intensity with which sensory or mental content is experienced. 82 , 85 Insight practice (Pāli: vipassana ), a form of open monitoring (OM) meditation, typically follows calm abiding training with the goal of facilitating meta-awareness of one's own mental habits, increasing the aperture of awareness to all sensory and mental objects that naturally arise and pass. Mindfulness meditation is often taught as an interplay between calm abiding and insight meditation. Therefore, according to the classical Buddhist Abhidharma, one depiction of a restful mind is one that requires concentration, but is calm, alert, and holding an object or stream of objects in effortless awareness.

Although the breath is the most commonly described object of focus in historical Buddhist contexts (e.g., Satipatthāna sutta ), concentration may be on any internal or external sensory object across modalities, the temporal flow of objects arising and passing through space/time, or the restful state where no objects are present ( Table 1 ). One particular contemporary mindfulness system, the Basic Mindfulness system, 86 was developed by Shinzen Young with multiple Buddhist traditions in mind and uses an algorithmic approach that teaches individuals to note and label any experience in three modalities (visual, auditory, or somatic). Sensory objects can be noted and labeled as they arise and pass in OM meditation, or there can be a concentrated focus on one particular modality and experience (i.e., subjective, objective, rest, or flow). A focus on rest is one particular concentration method for cultivating a quiet mind with specificity in each modality, such that absence of the sensory object becomes the object of focus and any impulse to engage with external or internal sensory objects is regulated. Young 86 describes “see rest” as a focus on the “gray-scale blank” with eyes closed or “into image space but not at an image” with eyes open; “hear rest” is described as “mental quiet” or “physical silence” around the practitioner; “feel rest” is referred to as a focus on the “physical relaxation and absence of emotion in one's body.” The different levels of absorption, modalities of concentration, and associated objective neurophysiology have yet to be fully characterized.

Note: The subjective labels “see in,” “hear in,” or “feel in” allow for noting internal sensory experience; “see out,” “hear out,” or “feel out” allow for noting objective sensory experience; “see rest,” “hear rest,” or “feel rest” allow for noting sensory rest; and “see flow,” “hear flow,” or “feel flow” allow for noting the flow of sensory objects across time. 86

Meditative concentration is sometimes referred to as “one-pointedness” (Sanskrit: samādhi) or “absorption” (Pāli: jhāna ). In Tibetan, samādhi is translated as ting nge dzin, where the syllable dzin means “to hold” and the syllable nge is an adverb meaning “to hold something unwaveringly.” The Nikāyas mention variations of samādhi and give descriptions of deepening levels of absorption on the object of attention. Four stages of absorption on form (Sanskrit: rupa jhānas ), four on formless ( arupha jhānas ), and total cessation of perception and feeling ( nirodha-samapatti ) are described in progressive stages of concentration and stillness. At the fourth stage of the rupa jhanas, the mind is focused on a “material” object with equanimity and a narrow aperture of awareness ( Fig. 1 ), such that no other sensory stimuli can enter awareness. By the first formless stage, the meditator achieves insight that there is no longer an object, but rather infinite empty space. The formless states and nondual awareness appear to have similar characteristics, none of which have yet been clearly distinguished in cognitive neuroscience. Stages of jhāna practice have been observed in one functional MRI (fMRI)/electroencephalography (EEG) case study of a long-term Sri Lankan Khema practitioner who was able to progressively move through each of the eight stages of form and formless absorption practice. 87 This study found decreased BOLD activity relative to the resting state and a basic state of concentration (access concentration) across visual, auditory, language, and premotor regions of interest; slight increases in the rACC and ventral striatum; and a shift to lower frequency α and θ bands in EEG. 87 Interestingly, the study suggested that ventral striatal activity corresponds to the subjective experience of joy during early stages. In the historical Hindu context of the yoga suttas, samādhi is believed to represent nondual or transcendent states of conscious awareness and absorption where the sensory or mental object is known directly, beyond name and form, and a feeling of unity or oneness is experienced with the object of meditation. 88 – 91 These descriptions of concentration practice suggest that, through practice and depth of concentration, mental quiet shifts from stable perception of an object to a state of nondual awareness where there is a dissolution of self–object distinctions.

In contemporary contexts, comparisons have been drawn between states of mindfulness in concentration and experiences of “flow,” “the zone,” peak states of performance, and the opposite domain—“zoning out.” Although there are clear similarities of samādhi with states of flow, distinctions can be made. Critically, samādhi is described to involve intentional blocking of sensory information and yet allowing motivationally relevant information to enter conscious awareness. 4 Without volitional control, absorption in an object with focal awareness may also be maladaptive, such that inhibitory processes prevent pertinent sensory information from arising to conscious awareness, potentially leading to an overwhelming sensation and maintenance of emotional reactivity related to the object of focus. 93 Furthermore, the experience of zoning out, as is commonly experienced during a temporally extended, exogenous attentional process that involves low arousal or does not require analytical or critical discernment (e.g., watching television), has also been described as an “intense immersion in the moment;” yet, the individual “typically loses touch with the socially, culturally, and historically constructed world in which he or she lives.” 94 This has been described as “meditation sickness” in Zen traditions that heavily emphasize methods that focus on achieving “inner stillness” over those that engage with the scriptures or discriminate right from wrong in an analytical or critical way 94

Mindful awareness: stillness in nonduality

Later stages of both jhāna and samatha practice place less emphasis on engagement and disengagement with objects of attention and more with nonduality, which refers to the eventual dissolution of subject–object distinctions, nonconceptual awareness, and a phenomenology described as the true nature of mind—an ultimate form of stillness. 82 , 85 Nonduality is most commonly equated with the concept of reflexive awareness (Sanskrit: svasamvitti ) 95 or “bare attention,” coined by the German-born monk Nyanaponika Thera in his book, The Heart of Buddhist Meditation . 3 This nonconceptual emphasis on living in the here and now is believed to have contributed to the foundations of contemporary mindfulness and of the therapeutic recipe for well-being. 94 , 96 In traditional nondual practices of mindfulness (e.g., Chan, Zen, Mahamudra, Dzogchen), 97 there is emphasis on the subject–object distinction as the root of suffering. The Sanskrit author Santideva describes this state of stillness as “remaining like a piece of wood,” such that any impulse toward a particular thought, emotion, or behavior can be heedfully detected but denied full engagement before the mental event requires cognitive resources. 97 , 98 The general instructions for Mahamudra practice are, “Do not chase the past; do not invite the future; rest the awareness occurring now in a clear and nonconceptual state.” 97 There is clear instruction to avoid self-reflective processing and maintain focus in the present; yet, the idea in this practice is not to cultivate a state of samādhi, but rather to release any effort, let go, and not engage with any object. In contrast to the stillness derived from focused concentration, the nondual emphasis is believed to cultivate stillness through an objectless focus. The nondual state has been referred to in Tibetan styles of Dzogchen as “open presence” (Tibetan: rigpa chogzhag ) and also as “awakening” (Pāli: bodhi ) or “nibbana.” Many Buddhist traditions see this as a goal state, where there is a cessation of all “unwholesome” states and all phenomena, including space and time. 99 Understandably, this state of awakening is highly contextualized in the schools of Buddhism from which they are originally described, and there has yet to be objective evidence for the reproducibility of this state. However, the state of open presence has been most closely associated with a nonreferential form of compassion that has been shown to dramatically increase -γ -band activity in advanced meditators across frontal and temporoparietal regions. 100 This activity was also found to correlate very closely with subjective reports of clarity during the practice and remain high in amplitude even after the meditation was complete. 100 γ-Band synchrony is believed to reflect control and temporal binding of local neural activity by distributed neural networks. 101 Theories of attention specify that continuous activation of task-relevant brain areas is driven by high-frequency γ-band activity, and greater magnitude of activity reflects stronger links between attention and sensory inputs. 101 Other neuroimaging experiments on nondual states have demonstrated unique, weak anticorrelations between the attentional networks and the DMN in comparison to stronger anticorrelations during FA practice, suggesting less inhibitory tone over other incoming sensory or mental input. 102 Although both concentration and nondual approaches appear to cultivate stillness in unique ways, the qualitative phenomenology may indeed be similar.

Mindful awareness and discernment versus mind wandering and evaluation

Recently, a number of studies have suggested a therapeutic role of mindfulness-based therapies in neuropsychiatric settings, in which symptoms are reduced explicitly through the reduction of persistent DMN activity and associated narrative self-processing interfering with goal-directed tasks. 103 – 108 This is particularly emphasized in contemporary mindfulness settings where nonconceptual awareness or nonjudgment is emphasized. Indeed, the practice of various styles of mindfulness-based meditation purportedly involve a decrease in self-reflective processing and evaluation. 28 , 30 It is therefore not surprising that, across styles of practice, meditation is found to inhibit activity of nodes within the DMN, similarly to any goal-directed task. 104 , 109 – 114 Furthermore, reports of improved quality of the meditation state 115 or greater meditative experience 116 have been associated with greater decreases in magnitude of activation in primary nodes of the DMN. The PCC, a major node in the DMN, has specifically been targeted for real-time neurofeedback, with the goal of improving one's stability of attention across styles of meditation. 115 , 117 Such results support the idea that meditation practice is undeniably an active cognitive process, and with greater expertise, the magnitude of the inverse correlation with DMN activity becomes greater, 109 suggesting that greater levels of effortless concentration may more robustly reduce activation in the DMN. Generally, one would expect such deactivation of the DMN during any goal-directed task, especially in contrast to a nonmeditative state following instructions to the mind wander 38 or in contrast to a task that specifically recruits self-reflective processing. 118 However, without any explicit instruction to process internal information in a discursive, narrative self-focus, a nonmeditative rest condition may no longer reflect the same mental content, process, or valence for an advanced meditator as in a novice practitioner. In fact, recent data have suggested that meditative expertise may transform the resting state into one that is more similar to a meditative state. 109 , 119 Furthermore, recent studies have demonstrated that spontaneous mind wandering that engages the DMN may still be apparent, but less frequent, during meditation or during nonmeditative states. 105 , 120 Yet, the contrast between a traditional nonmeditative resting state and particular styles of meditation provides considerable insight into the restful mind and how it engages with mental objects with and without awareness.

Although these results appear to suggest that mindfulness is involved in suppressing the DMN and associated self-reflective processing, this interpretation may be an oversimplification for the explanation of meditative expertise. Mindfulness is not merely the opposite of mind wandering, nor is it necessarily always present focused (see Refs. 94 and 96 ). Upon closer inspection of the meaning of mindfulness from the Sanskrit, Pāli, or Tibetan translations, there is a controversial emphasis on cognitive processes “to recollect,” “to bear in mind,” and “to remember.” 2 , 94 , 96 This is in contrast to the typical instruction to stay in the present moment of awareness without judgment. 121 Across schools of Buddhism, two aspects of mindfulness are often described, one in which there exists a nonconceptual state of awareness (Pāli: sati ) and another that involves discernment (Pali: sampajaňňa ), d requiring active reflection, judgment, and action in relation to the sensory or mental objects observed. 2 , 4 In fact, the compound sati-sampajaňňa is often found in the classical Abhidharma or Nikayas to describe a state of mindfulness. 84 Discernment is a cognitive process that reflects continuous access to, and appraisal of, the objects of attention as they arise, so that no thought can be developed into action unchallenged. 2 It facilitates recollection of Dharmic teachings and primes prosocial motivations. It is a process described to help eradicate mental afflictions and motives that potentially affect self-development on a moment-to-moment basis. 122 Without such discernment, the Abhidharma continues to explain that the mind begins to wander toward afflictive thoughts and emotions. Mindfulness and discernment are also described to develop a self- or meta-monitoring faculty that can detect when the goal state of concentration on a particular object has shifted and support a reorientation of attention to the goal-relevant object. This form of meta-awareness implies a nonconceptual, second-order, embodied reflection on experience as a form of experience itself and that is not entangled in the contents of awareness. 123

Given such descriptions, we hypothesize that a state of mindful awareness critically involves rapid flexibility between brain networks that are contextually driven by specific mind states of the practitioner. Building on previous models of mindfulness-based meditation processes, 28 , 30 , 124 we propose that a frontoparietal control network (FPCN) is appropriately situated to couple with, and integrate information across, other contextually relevant networks. The FPCN has the potential to support a volitional focus of stable attention and nonconceptual meta-awareness across bodily systems with a high level of sensory clarity and facilitate rapid discernment and evaluation of each object without strong engagement as mental objects arise and pass in the practitioner's phenomenological space ( Figs. 1 and ​ and3). 3 ). As described by Cole et al. , 45 the FPCN is believed to act as a hub to enhance connectivity between all other RSNs.

Comparison between mind wandering and OM meditation. Evaluative processes and associated DMN activity process visual, auditory, and somatic modalities and inhibit FPCN, VAN, and DAN attentional networks from gaining meta-awareness. The VAN (vlPFC and TPJ) is critical for reorienting, while the DAN (FEF and IPS) is critical for sustaining attention. Mind wandering and OM meditation process the same inputs (visual, auditory, somatic). OM has increased activation of attentional networks and flexible switching between networks. Mind wandering has less connectivity across networks and therefore lacks the meta-awareness to detect unintentional self-reflective or evaluative processing. The FPCN not only acts as a hub for detecting irrelevant mind wandering, but also for facilitating rapid discernment and evaluation when contextually appropriate. Thickness of lines represents proposed strength of connectivity between networks. SMA/PMA, supplementary and premotor areas; IPS, inferior parietal sulcus; pIPL/aIPL, posterior/anterior inferior parietal lobe; PI, posterior insula; AI, anterior insula; dmPFC, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex; vmPFC, ventromedial prefrontal cortex; r/dACC, rostral/ dACC cortex; S1, primary sensory cortex; PCC, posterior cingulate cortex; RSP, retrosplenial cortex; FPCN, frontoparietal control network; VAN, ventral attention network; DAN, dorsal attention network; FEF, frontal eye field; FPC, frontopolar cortex; dlPFC, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex; vlPFC, ventrolateral prefrontal cortex; MT+, middle temporal visual area; TPJ, temporoparietal junction; RSP, retrosplenial cortex; sc, superior colliculus; sgACC, subgenual anterior cingulate cortex; HF, hippocampal formation.

The dorsal attention network(DAN)is associated with externally directed cognition, including covert and overt shifts of attention, eye movements, and hand–eye coordination. 125 It increases in activation at onset of search, maintains activity while awaiting a target, and further increases when targets are detected. 73 , 125 , 126 It is bilaterally represented and includes frontal eye fields (FEFs), ventral premotor cortex, superior parietal lobe, intraparietal sulcus (IPS), and motion-sensitive middle temporal area (MT+). 54 The DAN facilitates orientation in the sense that it is engaged by cues that prime the system for forthcoming stimuli. 126 In contrast, the ventral attention network (VAN) is not engaged by predictive cues and, in fact, is kept under inhibitory control, likely by top-down regions, such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), for the purpose of reducing distraction or allowing unintended information from flooding conscious awareness. 125 The VAN is strongly right-hemisphere dominant and includes the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and ventrolateral PFC (vlPFC) as major nodes. The VAN continues to direct attention to salient and behaviorally relevant sensory stimuli outside the focus of processing maintained by the DAN. 126 The FPCN has been shown to have extensive connectivity with both the DMN and attentional networks (DAN, VAN), supporting the potential to flexibly couple with either network, depending on task demands. 73 The FPCN includes the VAN, nodes of salience (dorsal anterior cin-gulate (dACC) and AIC)) and executive control networks (dlPFC), as well as the anterior inferior parietal lobe (aIPL), frontopolar cortex (FPC), and dmPFC. 54 , 73 Together, this circuit is believed to link sensory representations to motor maps and facilitate the critical meta-awareness function that then engages a circuit breaker for sustained attention and reorientation of attention as new objects arise and pass. 126 Although frontal areas are responsible for voluntary executive control, parietal regions in concert with frontostriatal circuitry are more involved in stimulus–response associations and would likely become more critical as effort decreases. 126 The DAN and VAN may communicate through the FPCN when there is an intention to actively manipulate the information for some purpose. For example, the VAN is critical for semantic retrieval in the context of inhibitory control. 127 Through a relatively short temporal window, it has been proposed that the FPCN may help link active attentional processes associated with sustained vigilance and alerting with the semantic retrieval and reorientation of attention to task-relevant, but currently unattended, stimuli facilitated through the VAN. 126 The FPC takes up a uniquely large volume of space in the human brain, 128 is a critical node of the FPCN, and is thought to be differentially sensitive to changes in demands for stimulus-oriented or stimulus-independent attention along a lateromedial dimension. 74 This may be why this region is sometimes included in the DMN and at other times included with the frontoparietal or executive control network. 52 , 60 , 63 One study observed the recruitment of both rostromedial and lateral FPC during mind wandering with a lack of awareness; whereas, mind wandering with awareness was found to recruit nodes of attentional networks (lateral PFC and dACC) in addition to the PCC/precuneus, TPJ, insula, and temporal pole, suggesting a processing overlap that could account for poor task performance. 63 Yet, future research will have to clarify whether this type of retrospective experience-sampling method represents a form of nonconceptual meta-awareness that is likely in meditative practice or meta-cognition to involve some level of “mental stickiness” and contributes to distraction and future planning.

Although some methodological challenges remain in interpreting some of the existing initial findings for network interactions (see Ref. 31 ), recent cross-sectional fc studies of meditators have generally demonstrated increased connectivity between the two main nodes of the DMN (PCC and vmPFC) and between nodes of the DMN and salience and executive networks during a nonmeditative resting state. 109 , 111 , 114 , 129 – 132 These studies reflect changes that are sustained in nonmeditative states. In a small number of studies, increased fc has been found between DMN nodes and task-positive regions (e.g., dACC, dlPFC) during and across styles of meditation practice ( Fig. 3 ). Although some of the methodological discrepancies are difficult to interpret, these preliminary studies support the hypothetical flexible switching between networks and the potential functional relevance between nonconceptual awareness and discernment.

There is now evidence to suggest that the FPCN may be actively recruited through both OM and FA meditative practice. 133 – 135 Recent meta-analyses of both morphometric and functional neuroimaging studies of FA and OM have demonstrated increased size and activity in regions of the brain associated with the FPCN (FPC, dACC, dmPFC, dlPFC), areas also associated with the salience and executive networks. 133 , 135 Parts of the DMN (PCC, pIPL) have been shown to decrease in activity during OM and FA mindfulness–based practices. 134 , 135 These data suggest mindful awareness may not only contribute to a quiet mind embedded in concentration, but may also be critical for allowing individuals to flexibly switch between externally and internally driven processes in a volitional manner, drawing from inner reflection and focusing externally with more control than a control population. 30

Thus, a more nuanced reflection on the state of mindfulness, especially in the context of OM meditation, demonstrates significant similarities, and an interaction, with a state of mind wandering. Both mind wandering and OM meditation involve attentional orientation to mental objects arising and passing with each moment ( Fig. 1 ). Yet, subtle differences in attentional engagement, task relevance, emotional reactivity, and perceptual clarity determine the extent to which each state, and the content associated with each state, contributes adaptively (or not) to current mood or future behavior. In the context of OM meditation, 30 , 124 , 136 thoughts or emotions may arise, but the practitioner is typically instructed to refrain from engaging purposely with the content and to rather remain a witness as a nonattached observer to the content as it arises and passes without any form of appraisal. Such attentional processing will reduce cognitive elaboration and, thus, increase the speed at which one may disengage from objects of attention or reduce mental stickiness—a concept often described in contemporary mindfulness 137 , 138 as a disengagement deficit, more often found in SIT, and as a natural tendency to dedicate resources to an object of attention, such that few resources remain to capture any other pertinent environmental information until one is able to disengage and reorient. Over time, this form of mental stickiness on particular emotional stimuli can become habitual, contextually dependent, and highly automatized into the sensory–affective– motor scripts and schemas that dictate tendencies toward behavior. 139 – 141

There is some evidence suggesting that intensive training in meditation techniques reduces mental stickiness by enhancing monitoring of attention, 142 increasing a distributed attentional focus, 143 – 145 enhancing speed of attention allocation, engagement, and subsequent disengagement from serially presented objects of attention. 146 One of the best examples of this decrease in stickiness, or faster disengagement, in the extant meditation literature is shown by data from an attentional blink task 147 by practitioners who completed 3 months of intensive meditation training. 146 A smaller attentional blink and reduced brain-resource allocation to an object of attention (the first target) were found, as reflected by a smaller target 1 (T1)-elicited P3b, a brain-potential index of resource allocation peaking around 300–450 ms ( Fig. 4 ). 146 Those individuals with the largest decrease in brain-resource allocation to T1 generally showed the greatest reduction in attentional-blink size, and improved detection of T2. These observations provide strong support for the view that the ability to accurately identify T2 depends on the efficient deployment of resources to T1. Such data are also suggestive of reduced elaborative processing in the context of goal-directed activity. It should be clear that this process of discernment and evaluation may be operating below conscious awareness, at the level of nonconscious perceptual processing—an aspect of attentional filtering that has previously been described as a potential source for affective and attentional bias. 29 , 148 , 149

Brain potentials from electrode Pz, time-locked to T1 onset on short-interval trials (220–440 ms) as a function of session, T2 accuracy, and group. Selective reduction in T1-elicited P3b amplitude in no-blink trials is evident in meditation practitioners. Adapted, with permission, from Slagter et al. 146

In this article, we illustrated how the phenomenology of a restful mind can take adaptive or maladaptive forms that are context and content dependent. A sense of peace and quiet in the mind is proposed to arise through mental training in concentration, nonconceptuality, and discernment, in contrast to the untrained frenetic restlessness of mental time travel that is characteristic of daily activity in the postmodern setting. The frenetic resting state and associated brain network dynamics are believed to help scaffold attention and emotion throughout everyday waking life, but with the potential to interfere with cognitive performance, mood, and affect when mind wandering occurs in the context of cognitive demand. Mindfulness-based meditation is often viewed as the antidote for mind wandering, positing an overly simplistic polarization of mind wandering as bad and mindfulness as good. However, building on existing efforts to introduce a more nuanced perspective on the relationship between mindfulness and mind wandering, 32 we describe a potential neurocognitive framework in which mental training associated with mindfulness allows the practitioner to more skillfully gain volitional control, flexibility, and awareness over mind wandering, evaluation, and associated DMN activity without necessarily suppressing or avoiding the flow of mental content. Considering the functional role and dynamics between RSNs is complex, and, thus, the exact role played by the DMN and other attentional networks is likely to be context specific and modulated by the specific practices in which an individual engages. As a function of the situational demands, the FPCN is specifically proposed to rapidly and flexibly couple with the DMN and other attentional networks for contextually appropriate engagement and disengagement with relevant objects in the ongoing stream of mental and sensory content. Thus, a sense of tranquility or stillness of mind involves the elimination of distortions and distractions in an effortless and sustained form of awareness and can have lasting effects on one's mental habits, biases, and worldview in relation to the surrounding world. It is likely that a highly developed meta-awareness in the context of mindfulness-based practice may offer a key mechanism for rapid discernment of what is relevant at early stages of attentional processing while also providing sensory clarity and emotional stability through each moment of experience.

Unfortunately, there is a particular rhetoric surrounding the emphasis of nonconceptuality, nonjudgment, and present-moment focus that continues to lead to ethical, social, and developmental passivity in the contemporary mindfulness movement. Given the secular emphasis of mindfulness on the present moment, there is regrettably less emphasis on the benefits from an efficient ability to draw consciously from past experiences and the capacity to reflect inwardly. On closer inspection of the state of mindfulness, we discuss here the benefits of judgment, evaluation, conceptuality, and DMN activity to provide a more nuanced description of brain network interactions and the benefits delivered by these meditation techniques that are continuing to emerge in contemporary society. More broadly, these skills are not emphasized for personal gain, but rather to ultimately nurture the human connection and sense of meaning and purpose that provides the foundation for the benefits of realizing stillness.

Although the current theoretical analysis remains speculative, continued consideration of the resting state in comparison to meditation practice is likely to reveal specialized insights into brain function, energy metabolism, conscious awareness, and therapeutic relevance for psychiatric conditions. Future research investigating differences between FA and OM practices may help clarify critical differences between focal and ambient awareness, and the ability for individuals to volitionally modulate types of information that enter awareness through engagement and disengagement processes. Other considerations for future research should include tracking phenomenology using qualitative empathetic interviewing skills 150 with explicit second-person methods built into the neuroimaging studies, in addition to correlating first-person reports with third-person measures of brain activity. This method could involve independent, unbiased interviewers who may help participants explicate their experiences in order to direct them toward phenomenological aspects of their experience and away from theorizing about it. Examining the stability of RSNs across meditation states, axiological frameworks, and across a phenomenology of clarity and mind wandering, may better reflect consistent therapeutic targets that are context specific. More consistency across fc analyses will have to involve choosing consistent seeds for analyses and tracking functional changes across states and rest in both clinical samples and meditation-naive subjects who do not have a self-selection bias. As research progresses in this field, it is likely that differences between novice and advanced meditators will become apparent and may account for discrepancies in the ability to sustain/maintain nonconceptual forms of awareness during meditation and the speed with which practitioners can make discerning judgments. Indeed, even the greatest meditators report fluctuations in level of clarity with which meditative quality is experienced over time. Thus, future research would benefit from having closer measurements of neurophysiological changes as they directly relate to first-person reports on phenomenology of experiences, such as clarity in the context of meditation and throughout daily life.

Acknowledgments

The authors express gratitude to A.P. for the constructive feedback. F.Z. and D.R.V. wrote the paper.

a Eliot, T.S. 1943. Burnt Norton. Four Quartets. Orlando: Harcourt.

b Early schools of Theravada Buddhism describe a collection of scriptures and suttas in the Pāli Canon.

c Although Tulving argues that mental time travel is uniquely human, there is good evidence to suggest that scrub jays can cache food in a manner that reflects both planning for the future and some form of mental time travel to retrieve detailed information on when and where the food was cached. 79

d Sampajaňňa is also described in nondual traditions as a form of “monitoring,” rather than “clear comprehension” in Theravadan texts. Thus, this aspect of mindfulness may reflect a state of meta-awareness, decentering, or dereification that reflects an interaction between task-set retention and background awareness. 97

Conflicts of interest : The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Mind is a frequent, but not happy, wanderer: People spend nearly half their waking hours thinking about what isn’t going on around them

People spend 46.9 percent of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they're doing, and this mind-wandering typically makes them unhappy. So says a study that used an iPhone web app to gather 250,000 data points on subjects' thoughts, feelings, and actions as they went about their lives.

The research, by psychologists Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert of Harvard University, is described in the journal Science .

"A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind," Killingsworth and Gilbert write. "The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost."

Unlike other animals, humans spend a lot of time thinking about what isn't going on around them: contemplating events that happened in the past, might happen in the future, or may never happen at all. Indeed, mind-wandering appears to be the human brain's default mode of operation.

To track this behavior, Killingsworth developed an iPhone web app that contacted 2,250 volunteers at random intervals to ask how happy they were, what they were currently doing, and whether they were thinking about their current activity or about something else that was pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant.

Subjects could choose from 22 general activities, such as walking, eating, shopping, and watching television. On average, respondents reported that their minds were wandering 46.9 percent of time, and no less than 30 percent of the time during every activity except making love.

"Mind-wandering appears ubiquitous across all activities," says Killingsworth, a doctoral student in psychology at Harvard. "This study shows that our mental lives are pervaded, to a remarkable degree, by the non-present."

Killingsworth and Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, found that people were happiest when making love, exercising, or engaging in conversation. They were least happy when resting, working, or using a home computer.

"Mind-wandering is an excellent predictor of people's happiness," Killingsworth says. "In fact, how often our minds leave the present and where they tend to go is a better predictor of our happiness than the activities in which we are engaged."

The researchers estimated that only 4.6 percent of a person's happiness in a given moment was attributable to the specific activity he or she was doing, whereas a person's mind-wandering status accounted for about 10.8 percent of his or her happiness.

Time-lag analyses conducted by the researchers suggested that their subjects' mind-wandering was generally the cause, not the consequence, of their unhappiness.

"Many philosophical and religious traditions teach that happiness is to be found by living in the moment, and practitioners are trained to resist mind wandering and to 'be here now,'" Killingsworth and Gilbert note in Science. "These traditions suggest that a wandering mind is an unhappy mind."

This new research, the authors say, suggests that these traditions are right.

Killingsworth and Gilbert's 2,250 subjects in this study ranged in age from 18 to 88, representing a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds and occupations. Seventy-four percent of study participants were American.

More than 5,000 people are now using the iPhone web app the researchers have developed to study happiness, which can be found at www.trackyourhappiness.org .

• Brain-Computer Interfaces
• Social Psychology
• Neural Interfaces
• Computer Programming
• Educational Technology
• Social psychology
• Web crawler
• World Wide Web
• Philosophy of mind
• Rapid eye movement
• Computer vision
• Cognitive dissonance
• Information architecture

Story Source:

Materials provided by Harvard University . Original written by Steve Bradt, Harvard Staff Writer. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference :

• Matthew A. Killingsworth, Daniel T. Gilbert. A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind . Science , 2010; 330 (6006): 932 DOI: 10.1126/science.1192439

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REVIEW article

Mind wandering and education: from the classroom to online learning.

• 1 Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
• 2 Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

In recent years, cognitive and educational psychologists have become interested in applying principles of cognitive psychology to education. Here, we discuss the importance of understanding the nature and occurrence of mind wandering in the context of classroom and online lectures. In reviewing the relevant literature, we begin by considering early studies that provide important clues about student attentiveness via dependent measures such as physical markers of inattention, note taking, and retention. We then provide a broad overview of studies that have directly measured mind wandering in the classroom and online learning environments. Finally, we conclude by discussing interventions that might be effective at curbing the occurrence of mind wandering in educational settings, and consider various avenues of future research that we believe can shed light on this well-known but little studied phenomenon.

During the past decade, there has been impressive growth in research concerning the cognitive and neural bases of mind wandering, including a rapid expansion of experimental procedures that have rendered the phenomenon tractable for experimental studies, a growing body of reliable findings, and a number of theoretical proposals aimed to account for the phenomena of interest (for reviews, see Smallwood and Schooler, 2006 ; Smallwood, 2013 ). During the same time period, there has been a similarly impressive increase in the application of findings and ideas from cognitive psychology to understanding learning and retention in educational contexts (for recent reviews, see Roediger and Karpicke, 2006 ; Bjork et al., 2013 ; Dunlosky et al., 2013 ). It seems clear that these two domains of research should be highly relevant to one another, because mind wandering and related attention failures are widely recognized to be common in the traditional classroom setting (e.g., Johnstone and Percival, 1976 ; Bligh, 2000 ; Bunce et al., 2010 ) as well as in online education (e.g., Koller, 2011 ; Khan, 2012 ). Perhaps surprisingly, there has been relatively little research linking the two domains; indeed, only a few years ago, Smallwood et al. (2007) characterized mind wandering as an “underrecognized” influence in educational settings and provided a useful discussion of experimental results and conceptual/theoretical considerations relevant to linking the two domains.

In the past couple of years, systematic research has begun to emerge that focuses on the incidence and nature of mind wandering in both traditional classrooms as well as online learning environments. The primary purpose of the present article is to provide a focused review and discussion of recent research, as well as some lesser known older studies that examine the occurrence and consequences of mind wandering during both classroom and online lectures. In addition, we consider possible interventions for reducing the occurrence of mind wandering in educational settings and conclude by discussing potentially fruitful directions for future research.

Mind Wandering During Classroom Instruction

Within educational settings, the occurrence of mind wandering is perhaps most readily observable within the context of classroom instruction. Indeed, educators have long been concerned about the possible negative impact of mind wandering on student learning ( Brown, 1927 ; Lloyd, 1968 ). It is important to note, however, that few studies have directly measured mind wandering in the classroom. Instead, early research made use of measures such as physical markers of inattention, note taking, and retention. Data emerging from these early studies revealed important clues about the nature of student attentiveness over extended periods of study that have helped to guide more recent research on mind wandering in the classroom. In this section, we review and evaluate the basic findings emerging from these early studies, discuss the possible relation of these findings to mind wandering, and highlight direct attempts to measure mind wandering in the classroom. In addition, we assess the influence of possible interventions for reducing the occurrence of student mind wandering.

Observational Approaches

In what is often cited as a classic example of student attentiveness in the classroom, Johnstone and Percival (1976) asked observers to make note of physical signs of inattention, such as diversions in gaze, as students sat through chemistry lectures. The authors found that initial breaks in attention occurred after approximately 10–18 min of class time, and that the frequency of breaks in attention rose to a level of every 3–4 min toward the end of lectures. Indeed, the notion that student attentiveness decreases as a function of time spent in the classroom has strongly influenced research in this area. Nonetheless, it is important to note that physical markers of inattention should be interpreted cautiously ( Wilson and Korn, 2007 ). For instance, students who have momentarily directed their gaze away from the lecturer may still be listening to the lecturer, and not necessarily mind wandering; conversely, a focused gaze does not necessarily indicate a focused mind. Importantly, recent studies have drawn stronger links between physical markers of inattention and mind wandering. For example, Smilek et al. (2010) recently assessed the relation of blinking to mind wandering during a reading task. In that study, students were asked to indicate whether or not they were paying attention to the text in response to a series of auditory tones. The authors found that blinking was more likely to precede moments of inattention than attention, and suggested that blinking might facilitate the decoupling of attention from the immediate environment during instances of mind wandering. Moving forward, additional research is needed to demonstrate how physical markers of inattention relate to the occurrence of mind wandering in the classroom (for relevant discussion, see Bligh, 2000 ; Rosengrant et al., 2011 ).

Note Taking and Retention

Various attempts have been made to circumscribe the difficulties associated with inferring student attentiveness via direct observation. For instance, some researchers have focused on note taking. Although note-taking behavior does not necessarily correlate with comprehension (e.g., McClendon, 1958 ), reductions in note taking over time may indicate inattention on the part of students. Unfortunately, the conclusions that can be drawn on the basis of relevant data are equivocal. For instance, Maddox and Hoole (1975) and Scerbo et al. (1992) examined the percentage of ideal notes (notes deemed important by the experimenter) that students recorded during lectures (for further discussion on research approaches to note taking, see Aiken et al., 1975 ). Maddox and Hoole (1975) found no decline in note taking across five 10-min intervals of a geography lecture—44, 54, 50, 52, and 55% of ideal notes. Conversely, Scerbo et al. (1992) observed a steep decline in note taking across three 12-min intervals of a psychology lecture—97, 67, and 50% of ideal notes (see also Hartley and Cameron, 1967 ; Locke, 1977 ). One possibility for this discrepancy may be related to factors such as student interest. For instance, students in the geography class (51%) took significantly fewer notes across the entire lecture than students in the psychology class (71%), and high levels of initial note taking may be necessary to observe subsequent declines over time. Moreover, additional studies are needed to demonstrate the extent to which inattention and declines in note taking co-occur. Along these lines, Lindquist and McLean (2011) recently demonstrated that frequent bouts of mind wandering—as measured by direct probes of attention—were associated with lower subjective ratings of note taking. Whether this observation extends beyond subjective reports of note taking to actual note taking behavior remains to be tested.

Alternatively, various researchers have looked to measures of retention as proxies for student attentiveness in the classroom. Specifically, if students are less likely to pay attention to the latter portion of a lecture, then information presented toward the end of the lecture should not be retained as well as information presented in earlier portions of the lecture. Again, the evidence is somewhat mixed. While some studies have found reduced memory for information presented at the end of lectures ( Burns, 1985 ), others have not ( Thomas, 1972 ; Scerbo et al., 1992 for additional discussion, see McLeish, 1968 ). One possibility for this unreliable pattern of data is that the critical test is commonly presented immediately after the lecture. This design feature may allow students to rehearse information from the final portion of the lecture until the test is administered ( Glanzer and Kunitz, 1966 ). In order to more accurately assess what information students have integrated into their knowledge base, additional studies ensuring that students express their understanding of lecture content on the sole basis of long-term memory are needed. In addition to possible primacy and recency effects (e.g., Jersild, 1929 ; Ehrensberger, 1945 ), future studies might also consider the possible influence of other factors that might moderate attention over extended periods of time, such as the distinctiveness or relation of materials to one another across an entire lecture.

Although little is known about the relation of the occurrence of mind wandering and retention of lecture content, Lindquist and McLean (2011) showed that the frequency of mind wandering in response to direct probes of attention during one lecture was negatively correlated with retention of course material on an exam taken several weeks later. Moving forward, it will be important to more closely investigate the extent to which mind wandering accounts for both the immediate and long-term retention of specific materials from lectures.

Direct Probes of Attention and Mind Wandering

We now discuss in more detail studies that have used direct probes of student attention and mind wandering. These studies are important because they provide a more accurate depiction of the extent to which students are actually mind wandering in educational contexts. In one of the initial studies of this sort, Cameron and Giuntoli (1972) randomly interrupted college lectures with a bell and asked students various questions about the content of their conscious mind, including whether or not they were listening to the speaker, and, if so, whether their listening was “a superficial kind of listening accompanied by frequent distractions,” “a close following of the speaker's train of thought,” or a kind of listening in which they felt that they were “actively meeting the speaker's mind.” Depending on how one classifies students' responses, the results revealed that only between 40 and 46% of students were paying “good attention” to the lecturer or lecture content at any given moment. Using a similar method of consciousness sampling in undergraduate and graduate classrooms, Schoen (1970) estimated attention during lectures at only 67%, whereas attention during discussion was estimated at 75% (see also Geerligs, 1995 ) and attention during problem solving was at 83%.

Stuart and Rutherford (1978) asked medical students in twelve 50-min hematology lectures to indicate the extent to which they were paying attention using a 9-point scale (1 = not concentrating at all; 9 = maximum concentration). A buzzer that was audible to students sounded the attention probes at 5-min intervals. The authors found that students, on the whole, never indicated more than an “average level of concentration” throughout the lecture. Interestingly, the authors also found that student attention peaked around 10–15 min into the lecture, but that their attention waned considerably thereafter (see also, Johnstone and Percival, 1976 ; for possible alternative interpretations, see Wilson and Korn, 2007 ).

In a more recent study, Lindquist and McLean (2011) more directly assessed the occurrence of mind wandering during lectures. Specifically, the authors asked students in three 50-min psychology lectures to report on the occurrence of task unrelated thoughts in response to auditory attention probes that were sounded on five separate occasions—8, 15, 25, 34, and 40 min. Across the entire lecture, task unrelated thoughts were reported in response to ~33% of the attention probes. Moreover, the authors found that task unrelated thoughts were more likely to be reported at the end of the lecture (44%) than the beginning of the lecture (25%). As discussed earlier, Lindquist and McLean also demonstrated a negative impact of mind wandering on note taking and retention. We will revisit this important feature of the authors' data in the context of learning from online lectures, where researchers have greater control over study materials.

Other researchers have used experience sampling paradigms to estimate student attention in everyday life, and such results help contextualize the findings from classroom environments. Unsworth et al. (2012) asked students to record in a diary their attentional failures during everyday life, and found that the most frequent failures were distraction while studying and mind wandering in class; moreover, 76% of the reported lapses of attention—distraction, mind wandering, or absent-mindedness—occurred in classroom or study situations. Kane et al. (2007) asked undergraduates to report whether their minds were wandering at random times during the day. On the average, students' minds were wandering 30% of the time (see also, Hurlburt, 1979 ). Furthermore, mind wandering increased when students reported they were tired, stressed, and in boring or unpleasant activities. McVay et al. (2009) measured mind wandering in the everyday lives of college students, who similarly reported mind wandering on 30% of the samples. Here again, mind wandering was more frequent when students reported feeling tired or anxious, or when they rated the current activity as stressful or boring. Interestingly, mind wandering was also less frequent when participants reported being happy (see also, Killingsworth and Gilbert, 2010 ), good at the current activity (see also Moneta and Csikszentmihalyi, 1996 ), liking the current activity, or rating it as important.

It is important to note that assessments of mind wandering in different contexts are complicated in several important ways. For instance, educational activities such as sitting through a lecture and studying for an exam typically require sustained attentional focus, whereas non-educational everyday activities such as eating breakfast or checking the mail do not necessarily require an individual's undivided attention. Moreover, the consequences of mind wandering also depend on context: The cost of attentional failures during the attention-demanding tasks of education are almost certainly greater than the cost of attentional failures during highly rehearsed, largely automatic tasks of everyday life. As a result, mental experiences such as thinking about a recent or upcoming personal experience may be classified as mind wandering in one context but not the other, and may impact performance in one context but not the other.

In sum, studies making use of direct measures of student attention in educational settings have demonstrated that students frequently report lapses of attention and mind wandering in the classroom, mind wandering appears to increase as a function of time spent in class, and mind wandering may be especially prevalent in educational, as compared to non-educational, settings. Taken together, studies of student mind wandering in the classroom highlight the need for evidence-based research that considers the manner in which classroom instruction is structured, and what interventions might be effective for holding student interest and attention.

Classroom Interventions

Educational guidelines commonly urge teachers to intersperse their lectures with tasks that can help to re-focus student attention (e.g., Myers and Jones, 1993 ; Middendorf and Kalish, 1996 ; see also, Olmsted, 1999 ). Unfortunately, only a few attempts have been made to test the effectiveness of such techniques, and the data are often difficult to interpret.

For instance, Burke and Ray (2008) tested the efficacy of four active learning interventions (student-generated questions, guided reciprocal peer questioning, truth statements, and think-pair-share) across four instructional theory lectures. Each lecture was devoted to testing one of the four interventions, with the intervention occurring halfway through lecture. During each lecture, students were asked to rate their concentration levels on five separate occasions using a 4-point rating scale (1 = not concentrating at all; 4 = fully concentrating), including once at the start of class and once after the intervention. Although the authors demonstrated enhanced levels of concentration following some interventions (student-generated questions) and not others (truth statements), there was no baseline condition against which these effects could be evaluated. Additionally, the order in which students encountered the interventions was not counterbalanced (see also, Young et al., 2009 ). As a result, it is difficult to know for certain how effective the various interventions were in focusing the attention of students.

More recently, Bunce et al. (2010) asked students in three 50-min chemistry lectures to use clicker technology to indicate whenever their attention to lecture content had been drawn away by various distractions (e.g., texting, completing homework from other courses). In addition, the authors noted various pedagogical techniques used by the instructors of these lectures (e.g., lecturing, quizzing, demonstrations). Although the implementation of the pedagogical techniques was not experimentally manipulated, the authors found that bouts of distraction during lectures were reduced following quizzes and demonstrations. It is also important to note that attentiveness to lecture content was measured via self-reports of distraction that are potentially limited because students are often unaware that they are mind wandering ( Smallwood and Schooler, 2006 ; but see recent neuroimaging data suggesting common neural correlates for subjective and objective reports of mind wandering; Smallwood et al., 2008 ). Nonetheless, the results of this study are informative, and additional studies that carefully manipulate that frequency and timing of active learning interventions in the classroom, and that assess distraction and mind wandering in a more direct or objective manner, will be of considerable importance.

Next, we delve into the world of online education, and consider the limitations that mind wandering places on effective learning of lecture videos. As discussed below, the advent of online learning is of great interest in its own right in light of its recent prominence on the educational scene. Moreover, using online lectures as target materials has made it possible to study the occurrence of mind wandering during lectures, and explore possible interventions for reducing mind wandering, with tighter experimental control than is typically available in the classroom.

Mind Wandering During Online Lectures

The studies discussed in the preceding section indicate that mind wandering occurs frequently in the classroom and while studying. As noted earlier, in recent years there has been rapidly growing interest in online education. While online education has existed in some form for nearly as long as the Internet has been around, the emergence of such online platforms as Coursera and edX, which are composed of leading research universities, has led to a dramatic increase in the number of students participating in the entity known as a MOOC or massive open online course. The primary form of instruction in a MOOC is a videorecorded lecture delivered online. Given the frequent occurrence of mind wandering in the traditional classroom, an important question concerns whether mind wandering occurs to a similar, greater, or lesser extent in online settings. While there is very little systematic research on the topic, relevant data have been provided by two recent studies in which participants viewed videorecorded classroom lectures that to some degree resemble those used in online courses. Importantly, by mimicking the online experience in the laboratory, researchers have been able to bring the lecture learning experience, measures of the occurrence of mind wandering during lectures, and tests of possible interventions to ward off mind wandering during lectures under greater experimental control.

Risko et al. (2012) reported two experiments in which students watched videorecorded lectures—alone in Experiment 1, and with other students in a classroom setting in Experiment 2. Risko and colleagues showed participants one of three 1-h lectures on different topics (psychology, economics, or classics). In Experiment 1, 60 undergraduates watched the lectures and were probed at four different times into a lecture—5, 25, 40, and 55 min. During each probe, students were asked if they were mind wandering at that moment. Overall, participants indicated that they were wandering in response to 43% of the probes, with significantly more mind wandering observed in response to the two probes given during the second half of the lecture (52%) than to those given during the first half (35%). The increase in mind wandering across the lecture was associated with poorer performance on a test of lecture material given shortly after the lecture: students responded correctly to 57% of questions concerning the second half of the lecture, compared with 71% correct responses to questions concerning the first half of the lecture. Further, there was a significant negative correlation between test performance and mind wandering ( r = −0.32): individuals who performed more poorly on the test reported more mind wandering. Experiment 2 yielded a highly similar pattern of results: students reported mind wandering in response to 39% of probes, reports of mind wandering increased significantly from the first half of the lecture (30%) to the second (49%), and mind wandering during the second half of the lecture was associated with significantly poorer test performance compared with the first half of the lecture (for similar results, see Risko et al., 2013 ).

The incidence of mind wandering during videorecorded lectures was notably high—at least as high as the rate of mind wandering during classroom lectures reported by Lindquist and McLean (2011) . One possible contributing factor is the 1-h length of the videorecorded lectures used by Risko et al. (2012) . Some advocates of online education, such as Salman Khan, founder of the highly successful Khan Academy, and Daphne Koller, co-founder of Coursera at Stanford University, have argued that online lectures should be brief—as short as 10 min—in part because of concerns raised by earlier studies of classroom lectures, as discussed above, showing that individuals cannot sustain attention for longer periods of time ( Koller, 2011 ; Khan, 2012 ; for possible limitations associated with this view, see Wilson and Korn, 2007 ). Thus, it is possible that mind wandering would occur much less often during videorecorded lectures that are considerably shorter than the 1-h lectures used in the Risko et al. (2012) study.

Szpunar et al. (2013) addressed this issue in a study that used a 21-min videorecorded lecture. This study also examined the critical and as yet unaddressed question of whether it is possible to reduce mind wandering during an online lecture. Szpunar et al. (2013) addressed the question by interpolating brief tests within the lecture. Previous research using materials such as word lists, face-name pairs, and prose passages has shown that interpolating brief tests at regular intervals between lists of stimuli can help to improve retention of materials from the end of extended study sequences (see Szpunar et al., 2008 ; Weinstein et al., 2011 ; Wissman et al., 2011 ).

Szpunar et al. (2013) reported two experiments in which participants watched a 21-min videorecorded statistics lecture (results of the two experiments were very similar; here we focus on Experiment 2). The lecture was divided into four segments of equal length. Prior to the lecture, all participants were instructed that they might or might not be tested after each segment, and that they would also receive a final test at the conclusion of the lecture. Participants were encouraged to take notes during the lecture. After each lecture segment, all participants completed arithmetic problems unrelated to the lecture for about a minute. However, there were three different groups, which were defined by what the participants did next: the tested group received brief tests on each segment that took about 2 min each; the non-tested group did not receive a test until after the final segment, and continued to work on arithmetic problems for an additional 2 min for each of the segments preceding the final segment; and the re-study group did not receive a test until after the final segment, and was shown, but not tested on, the same material as the tested group for 2 min for each of the segments preceding the final segment. At random times during the lectures, participants in all groups were probed about whether they were paying attention to the lecture or mind wandering off to other topics.

Participants in the non-tested and re-study groups indicated that they were mind wandering in response to about 40% of the probes, but the incidence of mind wandering was cut in to half, to about 20%, in the tested group. Moreover, participants in the tested group took significantly more notes during the lectures (three times as many), and retained significantly more information from the final segment of the lecture, than did than participants in the other two groups, who performed similarly. Participants in the tested group were also less anxious about a final test that followed the lecture and performed significantly better on that final test than those in the other groups. These results indicate that part of the value of testing comes from encouraging people to sustain attention to a lecture in a way that discourages task-irrelevant activities such as mind wandering and encourages task-relevant activities such as note taking.

Taken together, the results of the studies by Risko et al. (2012 , 2013) and Szpunar et al. (2013) suggest that mind wandering occurs frequently during the viewing of online lectures regardless of lecture length: both studies found evidence of mind wandering in response to about 40% of probes in non-tested conditions, even though the lectures used by Risko et al. were three times as long as those used by Szpunar et al. We think that these estimates of mind wandering are probably conservative when one considers the conditions that characterize online learning in everyday life: many students may view online lectures under conditions conducive to mind wandering and distraction, such as at home or in dorm rooms that are full of potentially attention-diverting material such as friends, television, Facebook, e-mail, and the like (for further discussion, see Risko et al., 2013 ).

It is encouraging that interpolated testing can dramatically reduce the incidence of mind wandering, and increase the incidence of task-relevant activities such as note taking. Such findings provide some confirmation for those practitioners of online learning who are already incorporating interpolated testing into their online lectures. Nonetheless, the results reported by Szpunar et al. (2013) must be treated with some caution, both because they were obtained only with a single lecture on a single topic (i.e., statistics), hence raising the question of whether the beneficial effects of testing can be observed across lectures on a variety of topics, and also because it is unclear whether the benefits of testing will persist across multiple lectures. For example, it is possible that students become less responsive to interpolated testing as an online course goes on ( Dyson, 2008 ). Given the paucity of data available concerning processes and variables that affect learning from online lectures, these and related questions will be important to address in future studies.

Concluding Comments

In sum, early research using proxies of student attention such as physical manifestations of inattentiveness, note taking, and retention, along with more recent studies that more directly probe for instances of mind wandering, highlight the prevalence of attentional lapses and mind wandering in the classroom and during online learning. To some extent, student mind wandering reflects a larger reality of human mental life: just as our minds wander frequently in everyday life, they also wander frequently in educational settings. But mind wandering is particularly relevant to education for two reasons. First, on theoretical and empirical grounds, there is good reason to think that mind wandering is particularly prevalent in educational settings. Online or in the classroom, instruction and studying demand unusually sustained periods of student attention in the presence of unusually salient distractors. In everyday life, one is not typically expected to listen attentively to an hour-long presentation twice a day in a large room full of one's peers, or read large amounts of challenging literature on one's own time instead of socializing or browsing the internet. The attentional demands of lecturing or studying differ from the attentional demands of commuting, cooking, or conversing with colleagues. And as the studies we have summarized (e.g., Unsworth et al., 2012 ) suggest, mind wandering does seem to occur more frequently during instruction and studying than other activities.

Secondly, mind wandering is particularly relevant to education because learning depends critically on attention in ways that other activities do not. Indeed, engaging student attention is often considered an essential feature of education. In a recent survey of nearly 200 Harvard faculty (Advancing the science, 2013), they were asked to complete the following sentence: “For me, an essential of good learning or teaching is _________.” By far, the most common response was “engagement,” and we suspect students, teachers, and educators of all stripes would agree about the central importance of student engagement. Learning experiences—whether they occur in the classroom, library, dining hall, or online—are intended to engage student attention. And for good reason: If a student does not attend consciously to instruction due to an episode of mind wandering, then that student's learning is surely diminished, both for the content not initially encoded and any subsequent content that depends on this initial learning. Thus, because learning is the goal of instruction and studying—and because learning depends on attention—mind wandering presents a particular challenge to education.

What can students or instructors do to reduce unwanted mind wandering during instruction? As we outlined above, there is some preliminary evidence that interspersing periods of instruction with low-stakes quizzing can promote student attention. We also noted earlier that instructors are commonly encouraged to mix up the content of their lectures ( Middendorf and Kalish, 1996 ). In fact, cognitive psychologists have demonstrated that interleaving the presentation of various interrelated topics as opposed to dealing with each one in turn can help students to avoid confusing related concepts (e.g., Rohrer, 2012 ). Whether these approaches are effective because frequent changes of topic or brief exposures to any single topic—as compared to prolonged exposure to a single topic—help to sustain students' attention remains an open question for future research. Indeed, education researchers and psychologists have not satisfactorily explored how pedagogy affects mind wandering. To give another example, a considerable amount of research has demonstrated that spacing study over multiple learning sessions as opposed to massing (or cramming) study into a single learning session is a more effective means of ensuring long-term retention of classroom materials ( Cepeda et al., 2006 ; Pashler et al., 2007 ; Dunlosky et al., 2013 ) One interesting question for future research may be to examine the extent to which spaced, as compared to massed, study sessions are resistant to bouts of mind wandering and inattention. Given the relative ease of thought sampling methodology and relative importance of student attentiveness, we encourage researchers to expand the empirical literature.

To better understand the causes of and countermeasures against student mind wandering, it is perhaps worthwhile to consider contrasting scenarios. First, how does the experience of attending a lecture differ from the experience of attending other events as an audience member? Indeed, students face attentional requirements during instruction very similar to those of other audiences who passively watch extended presentations. In attending a lecture instead of a movie screening, musical performance, or theatrical performance, however, many of the situational interventions designed to avoid distraction are absent: smartphones and laptop use is allowed (or even encouraged) not banned, lighting is flat instead of focused, the audience whispers, enters, or exits with relative freedom, the stage is bare instead of carefully designed, the presented visuals are often textual, static, or basic instead of graphic, dynamic, and complex, and the audio narration is more likely to be monotonous than lively. For these reasons and others, the conscious experience of watching a 2-h movie is likely very different from that of attending a 2-h lecture.

Other experiments, imagined or real, might be equally revealing. For example, why does the conscious experience of a lecturer differ so greatly from those of the lectured? While students listening to a lecturer wander in their thoughts about a third of the time, the lecturer is typically able to maintain her attention during the same time period and in the same physical space. Why does this simple shift of perspective make such a difference? Might it be the distinction between activity and passivity (e.g., active engagement via intermittent quizzing seems to help), or the asymmetry of the social dynamics between student and instructor? Indeed, recent studies of online learning suggest that asking students to take the perspective of the instructor and teach concepts to virtual students helps to improve retention of course content ( Chase et al., 2009 ). Furthermore, perhaps the dramatically different perspective between the lecturer and the lectured furthers the problem of student mind wandering: If the lecture is extremely engaging for the lecturer but less so for students, then this difference of perspective might discourage lecturers from better designing instruction to engage student attention.

Finally, although we have focused considerable attention on the possible pitfalls of mind wandering during classroom and online learning, there also exists the possibility that mind wandering may in some instances benefit the learner. For instance, Baird et al. (2012) recently demonstrated that the occurrence of mind wandering during a period of incubation was positively correlated with the ability of students to generate solutions to problems designed to test creativity. Under what circumstances might mind wandering benefit classroom or online learning? Do individual differences in the characteristics of mind wandering episodes or propensity to engage in mind wandering predict whether mind wandering might help or hinder learning? Studies designed to answer these and similar questions might not only result in concrete recommendations to students and instruction, but might also uncover new insights into mind wandering, attention, and psychology.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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Keywords: mind wandering, attention, educational psychology, learning, teaching, online learning

Citation: Szpunar KK, Moulton ST and Schacter DL (2013) Mind wandering and education: from the classroom to online learning. Front. Psychol . 4 :495. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00495

Received: 04 June 2013; Paper pending published: 22 June 2013; Accepted: 15 July 2013; Published online: 01 August 2013.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2013 Szpunar, Moulton and Schacter. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Karl K. Szpunar, Department of Psychology, Harvard University, 33 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA e-mail: [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Research: Interpolated memory tests reduce mind wandering and improve learning of online lectures

Study showing that intermittently breaking up online lectures with quizzes reduced the occurrence of mind wandering, increased the frequency of note taking, and facilitated more efficient learning (by Harvard psychology professor Daniel Schacter and former fellow Karl Szpunar).

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Mind Wandering in a Smartphone World: The Impact of Pervasive Smartphone Usage on Mind Wandering and Attentional Restoration

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November 24, 2010

A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy One

New research underlines the wisdom of being absorbed in what you do

By Jason Castro

We spend billions of dollars each year looking for happiness, hoping it might be bought, consumed, found, or flown to. Other, more contemplative cultures and traditions assure us that this is a waste of time (not to mention money). ‘Be present’ they urge. Live in the moment, and there you’ll find true contentment.

Sure enough, our most fulfilling experiences are typically those that engage us body and mind, and are unsullied by worry or regret. In these cases, a relationship between focus and happiness is easy to spot. But does this relationship hold in general, even for simple, everyday activities? Is a focused mind a happy mind? Harvard psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert decided to find out.

In a recent study published in Science, Killingsworth and Gilbert discovered that an unnervingly large fraction of our thoughts - almost half - are not related to what we’re doing. Surprisingly, we tended to be elsewhere even for casual and presumably enjoyable activities, like watching TV or having a conversation. While you might hope all this mental wandering is taking us to happier places, the data say otherwise. Just like the wise traditions teach, we’re happiest when thought and action are aligned, even if they’re only aligned to wash dishes.

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The ingredients of simple, everyday happiness are tough to study in the lab, and aren’t easily measured with a standard experimental battery of forced choices, eye-tracking, and questionnaires. Day to day happiness is simply too fleeting. To really study it’s causes, you need to catch people in the act of feeling good or feeling bad in real-world settings.

To do this, the researchers used a somewhat unconventional, but powerful, technique known as experience sampling. The idea behind it is simple. Interrupt people at unpredictable intervals and ask them what they’re doing, and what’s on their minds. If you do this many times a day for many days, you can start to assemble a kind of quantitative existential portrait of someone. Do this for many people, and you can find larger patterns and tendencies in human thought and behavior, allowing you to correlate moments of happiness with particular kinds of thought and action.

To sample our inner lives, the team developed an iPhone app that periodically surveyed people’s thoughts and activities. At random times throughout the day, a participant’s iPhone would chime, and present him with a brief questionnaire that asked how happy he was (on a scale from 1-100), what he was doing, and if he was thinking about what he was doing. If subjects were indeed thinking of something else, they reported whether that something else was pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant. Responses to the questions were standardized, which allowed them to be neatly summarized in a database that tracked the collective moods, actions, and musings of about 5000 total participants (a subset of 2250 people was used in the present study).

In addition to awakening us to just how much our minds wander, the study clearly showed that we’re happiest when thinking about what we’re doing. Although imagining pleasant alternatives was naturally preferable to imagining unpleasant ones, the happiest scenario was to not be imagining at all. A person who is ironing a shirt and thinking about ironing is happier than a person who is ironing and thinking about a sunny getaway.

What about the kinds of activities we do, though? Surely, the hard-partiers and world travelers among us are happier than the quiet ones who stay at home and tuck in early? Not necessarily. According to the data from the Harvard group’s study, the particular way you spend your day doesn’t tell much about how happy you are. Mental presence - the matching of thought to action - is a much better predictor of happiness.

The happy upshot of this study is that it suggests a wonderfully simple prescription for greater happiness: think about what you’re doing. But be warned that like any prescription, following it is very different from just knowing it’s good for you. In addition to the usual difficulties of breaking bad or unhelpful habits, your brain may also be wired to work against your attempts stay present.

Recent fMRI scanning studies show that even when we’re quietly at rest and following instructions to think of nothing in particular, our brains settle into a conspicuous pattern of activity that corresponds to mind-wandering. This signature ‘resting’ activity is coordinated across several widespread brain areas , and is argued by many to be evidence of a brain network that is active by default. Under this view our brains climb out of the default state when we’re bombarded with input, or facing a challenging task, but tend to slide back into it once things quiet down.

Why are our brains so intent on tuning out? One possibility is that they’re calibrated for a target level of arousal. If a task is dull and can basically be done on autopilot, the brain conjures up its own exciting alternatives and sends us off and wandering. This view is somewhat at odds with the Killingsworth and Gilbert’s findings though, since subjects wandered even on ‘engaging’ activities. Another, more speculative possibility is that wandering corresponds to some important mental housekeeping or regulatory process that we’re not conscious of. Perhaps while we check out, disparate bits of memory and experience are stitched together into a coherent narrative – our sense of self.

Of course, it’s also possible that wandering isn’t really ‘for’ anything, but rather just a byproduct of a brain in a world that doesn’t punish the occasional (or even frequent) flight of fancy. Regardless of what prompts our brains to settle into the default mode, its tendency to do so may be the kiss of death for happiness. As the authors of the paper elegantly summarize their work: “a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.” 

On the plus side, a mind can be trained to wander less. With regular and dedicated meditation practice, you can certainly become much more present, mindful, and content. But you’d better be ready to work. The most dramatic benefits only really accrue for individuals, often monks, who have clocked many thousands of hours practicing the necessary skills (it’s not called the default state for nothing).

The next steps in this work will be fascinating to see, and we can certainly expect to see more results from the large data set collected by Killingsworth and Gilbert. It will be interesting to know, for example, how much people vary in their tendency to wander, and whether differences in wandering are associated with psychiatric ailments. If so, we may be able to tailor therapeutic interventions for people prone to certain cognitive styles that put them at risk for depression, anxiety, or other disorders.

In addition to the translational potential of this work, it will also be exciting to understand the brain networks responsible for wandering, and whether there are trigger events that send the mind into the wandering or focused state. Though wandering may be bad for happiness, it is still fascinating to wonder why we do it.

Are you a scientist? Have you recently read a peer-reviewed paper that you want to write about? Then contact Mind Matters co-editor Gareth Cook, a Pulitzer prize -winning journalist at the Boston Globe, where he edits the Sunday Ideas section. He can be reached at garethideas AT gmail.com