This post is going to be short and sweet but your mind will still wander off while you’re reading. And that’s okay it seems.

Here’s the scoop on a new study that says that a certain amount of zoning out while you’re trying to concentrate is not just natural, it’s probably pretty good.  It seems when your mind wanders what it may doing is the important work of problem solving and looking at the big picture for the future.

Experiments detailed in Discover Magazine by Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at UC Santa Barbara and one of the leading researchers on mind wandering.  His experiments found that when a group of undergraduates attempted to read the beginning of War and Peace, their minds wandered 5.4 times in a 45-period.

When they did further research they found there were two kinds of mind wandering: mind wandering when you are aware that you’re thinking about something else and mind wandering without awareness. He calls this second kind “zoning out.”

He found that two areas of the brain became active during mind wandering, one is the executive control system which exerts a top-down influence on our conscious and unconscious thought directing the brain to important goals.  The 2d region is called the default network and becomes active during self-referential things such recounting personal experiences and picturing yourself in the future.

The fact that both of these important brain networks become active together suggests that mind wandering is not useless mental static. Instead, Schooler proposes, mind wandering allows us to work through some important thinking. Our brains process information to reach goals, but some of those goals are immediate while others are distant. Somehow we have evolved a way to switch between handling the here and now and contemplating long-term objectives.

That would seem to account for the phenomenon of solving a problem just when you’ve stopped thinking about it, but it also seems to be at conflict with some of the principles of meditation practice that has one always trying to bring back a wandering mind to the present and a state “mindlefullness”.

Did you wander off or are you still here?  The entire web experience is one of mind wandering.