Notes on the Wandering Mind 5: The Wandering Mind is a...Creative Mind?

“When this great one was weaned, he began to wander in his mind…”

– Maimonides on Abraham

The moment I read the title, “The Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind,” I was filled with an insistent question: How could Wandering be inherently negative? Mustn’t it depend on what you’re wandering to, or wandering from, and why? The question wedged itself in among the rest, a little note crushed into a crevice of my cranial Wailing Wall: like all real questions, the ones worth Wandering with, simultaneously a little prayer. 

Learning about the design of the experiment that informed the study was illuminating: researchers created an app that could contact 5000 people from 83 different countries at random moments throughout the day, ask them what they were doing the moment before the interruption, and to report their feeling-states in the respective activities. Almost half of them reported that they had been thinking about things other than the particular task or activity they were engaged in, i.e. mind wandering. However, even when imagining highly pleasant activities – which would have been expected to produce a surge of happiness – they reported being no happier than when their minds were not wandering. 

The researchers concluded that the reason for the disparity was the mind-wandering itself, the negative pull of which neutralized subjects’ ability to enjoy their otherwise pleasurable imaginings. 

In the decade-plus since the study was published, the neuroscientific study of mind-wandering has undergone a nearly 180-degree paradigm shift in how the act is viewed and valued. Pathbreaking functional neuroimaging (fMRI) studies have demonstrated, for example, that the mind is always wandering, in ways previously unfathomed. 

For example, one study measured blood flow to the brain when it was focused on a specific task, versus when it was focused on nothing in particular at all. Researchers – expecting to see a large disparity between the two, given the tendency of blood to be directed to where the brain is most engaged – were stunned to find only a 5%-10% drop in blood flow when the mind was, their model presumed, functionally inert. 

Further research helped explain why. Scans showed that when freed of task-performance, the brain doesn’t simply slip into sleep mode. Instead, other regions kick into gear: the regions involved in things like resolving areas of cognitive dissonance, chipping away at intractable life problems, reviewing unresolved memories, planning for the future, imagining other people’s lives. A highly engaged, associative, largely unconscious Wandering, whose job is weaving together all our disparate mental materials into the conscious experience of seamless subjective selfhood we all take for granted. 

In retrospect, as psychology professor Michael C. Corballis writes in The Wandering Mind: What the Brain Does When We’re Not Looking, it is not hard to imagine interpretations of the above “Unhappy Mind” experiment that do not involve branding mind-wandering as dysphoric at its core. “Most people,” for example, “find their jobs boring at times, and wish they were somewhere else, but then feel guilty for doing so.” By this explanation, the source of the unhappiness participants reported is not wandering, but the social conditioning that trains us to label wandering as problematic and feel guilty about it (what Corballis calls all the “rather bad press associated with mind wandering”). To the contrary, he explains,

it seems we are programmed to alternate between mind-wandering and paying attention, and our minds are designed to wander whether we like it or not. In adapting to a complex world, we need to be able to escape the here and now, and consider possible futures, mull over past mistakes, understand how other people’s minds work. Above all, mind wandering is the source of creativity, the spark of innovation that leads in the longer run to an increase rather than a decrease in well-being. Maybe we should stop feeling guilty about mind wandering, and learn to revel in it. (Corballis, p. 11)

Perhaps when we are able to replace that conditioning with an all-encompassing acceptance of ourselves as Wanderers at the core of our nature, we can start to enjoy it – and start reaping its innumerable advantages and rewards.