Latest news with #mindwandering
Medical News Today
06-07-2025
- Health
- Medical News Today
Letting your mind wander could help you learn
Daydreaming may often be seen as the ultimate time-wasting activity. However, researchers are now showing that letting your mind wander may have more benefits than previously thought.A recent study from Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary has found that allowing your mind to wander while engaged in a simple task may actually improve than that, participants who allowed themselves to daydream during a simple task were able to complete it just as effectively as those who had remained focused on the activity throughout.'Mind wandering poses an unresolved puzzle for cognitive neuroscience: It is associated with poor performance in various cognitive domains, yet humans spend 30–50% of their waking time mind wandering.'So claim the authors of a recent study published in The Journal of Neuroscience, citing previous literature on this author Péter Simor, PhD, and his colleagues from Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary, however, were keen on challenging assumptions that daydreaming negatively affects is 'wakeful rest''The idea to study the potentially beneficial influence of mind wandering on information processing occurred to us during the COVID pandemic, when we had plenty of time to mind wander,' Simor told Medical News Today on a lighthearted note. Further, the researchers were 'inspired by the studies of local sleep indicating that sleep in a regionally and temporally localized manner can occur in the waking brain, and were also enthusiastic about the studies of Thomas Andrillon and colleagues, who showed that mind wandering […] [is] related to local sleep occurring in wakefulness.'Put simply, daydreaming, as its name aptly suggests, is a form of 'wakeful rest,' so Simor and his collaborators believed that, just like any form of rest, it may actually help give the brain a little 'boost.''We hypothesized that mind wandering linked to local sleep might not have only negative impacts, but may also facilitate information processing, especially in tasks that do not require effortful attention and which are learned without conscious awareness. If mind wandering facilitates learning in probabilistic learning — which is what we observed — perhaps there is no more room for post-learning sleep to improve performance. Maybe these kinds of learning do not require sleep at all, because information is processed during practice and episodes of mind wandering.'– Péter Simor, PhDStill, mind wandering is not just the same as sleep, Simor and his colleague, Dezső Németh, PhD, the study's senior author, cautioned.'By 'rest' during wake we refer to a state when the brain transiently decouples from the demands of the external environment to engage in internally dominated cognitive processes,' Simor and Németh explained for MNT. 'Nevertheless, this disconnection is just transient and limited in time and space (brain regions), therefore it just resembles some aspects of sleep, but it is markedly different from sleep,' they experience a learning 'boost'To find out how letting your mind wander actually impacts cognition, they designed a study where 27 participants — young adults in their 20s, an almost even split between male and female — had to complete a simple learning they were doing this, the researchers recorded their brain activity using high-density electroencephalography, form of technology specially designed for behavioral participants engaged in a probabilistic learning task — a simple task that involved extracting information but without requiring high levels of task completion, they filled in a questionnaire assessing how focused they perceived themselves to have been while engaged in the researchers found that participants who had allowed their minds to wander during the task had brain activity indicative of a 'sleep-like' state at the time of the experiment. This was also associated with 'enhanced probabilistic learning,' especially in the early stages of the of this is to say that the daydreamers appeared to experience a boost in learning capacity. Moreover, the researchers also found that daydreamers and focused participants were both able to complete the task just as to MNT, Caroline Fenkel, DSW, LCSW, adolescent mental health expert, and Chief Clinical Officer at Charlie Health, who was not involved in this study, commented that 'the findings […] add to a growing body of research that challenges the idea that 'focus equals learning'.''As a clinician, I find it compelling that the brain might be quietly learning in the background while we daydream,' Fenkel added, noting that 'this study highlights that the brain is always working, even when it seems like we've checked out.''And for folks who've been told they're 'not paying attention enough,' especially those with ADHD or trauma histories, this can feel validating and hopeful,' she does mind wandering contribute to learning?The mechanisms behind how mind wandering might help enhance learning capacity under certain circumstances, though, remain and Németh were wary of providing a full hypothesis in the absence of hard evidence. 'We prefer to remain cautious about causality,' they told they noted that:'What we observe is the periods of mind wandering are not negatively but, to some extent, positively associated with nonconscious, probabilistic learning, which is a very fundamental form of learning. […] Mind wandering may reflect a state when cognitive resources are allocated to process information at the expense of accurate responses and sustained attention. One possibility is that mind wandering is linked to sleep-like neural activity, which facilitates information processing and memory consolidation. The other possibility is that mind wandering reflects a state when controlled, so called model based processes are attenuated and associative, automatic, model-free learning is increased.'At the same time, they cautioned that daydreaming is, admittedly, not always helpful, and that we need to be careful about allowing our minds to wander in situations that require our full, dedicated awareness and engagement.'This [study] finding does not question the widely established observation that mind wandering exerts a negative influence on a variety of cognitive domains, especially those which require effortful attention,' said Simor and Né work from Simor, Németh, and their collaborators is also on the horizon. 'We have a lot of plans for continuing this research — from the perspectives of sleep research, learning and memory, and intervention studies,' Simor and Németh told list of upcoming trials the team is looking forward to is extensive: 'On the sleep research side, we're studying patients with narcolepsy, who are likely to experience more mind wandering during the day. We want to see how this affects their learning and predictive processes. […] We've also started an intervention study where we use noninvasive brain stimulation to enhance sleep-like slow-wave activity in the brain. and investigate whether this leads to increased mind wandering and improved implicit learning.'For now, daydreamers can rest easy in the knowledge that not every distraction is bad news for the brain.
The Guardian
15-06-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
The big idea: should we embrace boredom?
In 2014, a group of researchers from Harvard University and the University of Virginia asked people to sit alone with their thoughts for 15 minutes. The only available diversion was a button that delivered a painful electric shock. Almost half of the participants pressed it. One man pressed the button 190 times – even though he, like everyone else in the study, had earlier indicated that he found the shock unpleasant enough that he would pay to avoid being shocked again. The study's authors concluded that 'people prefer doing to thinking', even if the only thing available to do is painful – perhaps because, if left to their own devices, our minds tend to wander in unwanted directions. Since the mass adoption of smartphones, most people have been walking around with the psychological equivalent of a shock button in their pocket: a device that can neutralise boredom in an instant, even if it's not all that good for us. We often reach for our phones for something to do during moments of quiet or solitude, or to distract us late at night when anxious thoughts creep in. This isn't always a bad thing – too much rumination is unhealthy – but it's worth reflecting on the fact that avoiding unwanted mind-wandering is easier than it's ever been, and that most people distract themselves in very similar, screen-based ways. Smartphones have also increased the pressure to use our time productively, to optimise every minute of our lives. If once a harried commuter might have been forced to stare out of the window or read a book on the train to work, now they may try to catch up on their emails to avoid feeling guilty and inefficient. To sit and do nothing is seen as a waste of time. But that ignores the fact that when we're doing nothing we're often thinking quite hard. What happens to all those difficult or untamed half-thoughts that start to form in the milliseconds before we dig into our pockets and pull out our phones again? Most psychologists studying boredom would agree that, while it can feel unpleasant, it's useful. Like hunger or loneliness, it alerts us to a need, a desire to do something different. According to Erin Westgate, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Florida, we become bored if something fails to absorb our attention, or when we perceive it as meaningless. This is not to say that something needs to be both engaging and meaningful to keep us interested: doing sudoku might be absorbing but relatively meaningless, while reading a Peppa Pig bedtime story for the 500th time is not engaging but may nonetheless feel like a meaningful thing to do. Watching paint dry is both unstimulating and pointless, which is why it isn't a common pastime. In any case, when boredom strikes it should ideally serve as a prompt to do something more engaging or meaningful. If you don't react appropriately to your boredom, or perhaps if engaging or meaningful things aren't available to you for whatever reason, you may find yourself becoming chronically bored. That is associated with a range of problems, including depression, anxiety, poor life satisfaction, lower academic achievement, substance abuse and excessive risk-taking. There is evidence to suggest that chronic boredom is becoming more common, and that this uptick has coincided with the rise of smartphones. In a paper published last year, researchers noted that the proportion of students in China and the US who described themselves as bored steadily increased in the years after 2010, during the first decade of smartphone dominance. Why might digital media have this effect? Research has shown that the main reason we pick up our phones or check our socials is to relieve boredom, but that the behaviour actually exacerbates it. One study, for instance, found that people who were bored at work were more likely to use their smartphones – and subsequently feel even more bored. It may be that checking your phone only addresses part of what you need when you start to feel bored. Digital devices are very good at attracting your attention – in fact, everything you interact with on a screen has been designed to capture, hold and monetise it – but much of what we do online doesn't feel meaningful. It's incredibly easy to plan to look at your phone for just five minutes and resurface two hours later with Mastermind-level knowledge of the latest Blake Lively controversy or your ex's holiday plans. The average American spends more than four hours a day on their smartphone and more than seven hours a day in total online. That adds up to spending 17 years of your adult life browsing the internet. I expect that even the biggest technophiles would agree that this isn't how they want to spend their one precious life. Phones' efficacy at whisking us into superficial stimulation short-circuits our boredom and allows us to swiftly evade messages that we might need to hear, such as 'Why am I feeling this?' or 'What do I need that I'm not getting?' If we pause and listen, then perhaps we can make a choice rather than being manipulated by software engineers. When boredom strikes, we should resist the urge to assuage it instantly and ask ourselves: are we in search of pure entertainment or something more purposeful, an opportunity to connect with friends or our community or something different, something new? The people who choose to embrace boredom, at least for a while, may paradoxically experience less of it. It could even be the first step towards a life that feels more stimulating overall: meaningful, creative and free. Bored and Brilliant by Manoush Zomorodi (Pan Macmillan, £14.99) Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport (Penguin, £10.99) The Antidote by Oliver Burkeman (Vintage, £10.99)
