The Wandering Mind
Head tilted to the left, pupils in the farthest left-hand corner of both eyes: This is a characteristic pose of my son Charlie. (We have a photo of him as a two-month-old doing this; his eyes are huge and round.) When Charlie holds his head in this way he does not respond to anything said to him or, it seems, to anything around him. I have sometimes referred to Charlie in this pose as “day-dreaming,” though I really do now know what is going on in his mind at these moments of “down time” in which he is not (or so it appears) doing much of anything.
Pure Pedantry has a post today by Jake Young about A neural system for mindlessness that looks at the topic of the wandering mind: What is going on “in there” when one is daydreaming; when Charlie is “staring off into space”? Young considers the findings of an fMRI study in Science about this “stimulus independent thinking” (SIT).
The researchers got subjects to lapse into SIT by training them to do a verbal or visuospatial learning task repeatedly. They trained them so much that the subjects got really good at it, and this allowed their minds to wander because the task no longer required their complete attention.
The researchers then placed the subjects doing the task into an fMRI scanner and looked for those parts of the brain that were associated with mind wandering as opposed to when they had to perform a novel task which required them to actually pay attention.
The participants were then asked how much their minds had been wandering; the researchers found that there was a “consistent set of activation associated with SIT.” Mind wandering is far from purposeless, as Young quotes from the researchers’ Science study:
What is the functional significance of a system that wanders from its current goals? One possibility is that SIT enables individuals to maintain an optimal level of arousal, thereby facilitating performance on mundane tasks. A second possibility is that SIT — as a kind of spontaneous mental time travel — lends a sense of coherence to one’s past, present, and future experiences. Finally, the mind may generate SIT not to attain some extrinsic goal (e.g., staying alert) but simply because it evolved a general ability to divide attention and to manage concurrent mental tasks. Although the thoughts the mind produces when wandering are at times useful, such instances do not prove that the mind wanders because these thoughts are adaptive; on the contrary the mind may wander simply because it can.
Mindwandering is something the brain can do—-a skill? an ability?—-”because it can.” As the Science abstract notes, “the current investigation demonstrated that mind-wandering is associated with activity in a default network of cortical regions that are active when the brain is ‘at rest.’” Consider this study along with a recent post by Autism Diva on down time as a sort of survival skill, a time to be alone and refocus and replay all that was going on in “busy time” (if I may refer to such in contrast to “down time”). The Science study suggests that the brain is at work when it seems to be wandering, and that this wandering may be of unacknowledged importance.
As Charlie has gotten older, we have come to learn his need for times when he is not doing “anything”—or perhaps I should say, when he is doing “nothing in particular” while running up and down the driveway, sitting and staring out the front window, humming. A casual observer would say that he is “out of it” at those times and “disconnected,” when in fact he may be doing quite the opposite, replaying things that have happened in his head—thinking about his favorite things—just thinking about all he needs to thinking about.
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POSTED IN: Health, Neuroscience, Science
9 opinions for The Wandering Mind
mcewen
Mar 27, 2007 at 7:09 pm
I’ve adopted the ‘American children are over scheduled’ theory, so more ‘down time’ is required - but maybe I’m just getting lazy.
Cheers
Club 166
Mar 27, 2007 at 7:48 pm
I definitely feel that current day American children are way over scheduled. When I grew up, we had one, maybe two activities per week, max (Of course, there wasn’t much time left after walking back and forth 10 miles each way to school barefoot in the snow).
Usal
Mar 27, 2007 at 8:03 pm
Odd, I also was not overscheduled as a child, but I remember my mind wandering like this. In fact I still do it often today as an adult.
It’s just an easy way to use multi-tasking to keep from being bored. I do it when doing uninteresting repetitive tasks, or when I can’t think of anything else to do (or if what I was supposed to do was something I wasn’t interested in like most of my school work as a kid.) It can also help when trying to recover from a shutdown to let you mind wander on something that soothes and relaxes when you’re sitting there staring at the wall rocking back and forth.
But then not everytime I’m sitting and seeming to stare at nothing is mind wandering. Sometimes I’m just watching the rain, which is wonderfully relaxing and calming. Or something similar.
Joeymom
Mar 27, 2007 at 9:21 pm
My poor little guy is definitely overscheduled- all these therapies! So we do try to give him minutes to himself every day. He just goes and goes and goes, work work work. But he gets so insanely disconnected when he doesn’t have them. It makes it really hard to gauge how much is enough.
When I was Joey’s ag, my mom didn’t “schedule” us, but we were always doing things- playing blocks, making up stories, playing with play-dough, painting, drawing, reading. Mostly stuff Joey doesn’t know how to do yet. The therapies are supposed to be helping him with skills for problem solving and logic that allows for imagination and play. I suppose we shall see…
Kristina Chew, PhD
Mar 27, 2007 at 9:48 pm
I was a somewhat over-scheduled child as I got older—and also very fond of letting my mind wander, often while running. (And now, while driving, always with music.)
Figuring out the “down time/busy time” ratio for Charlie has evolved over time. He has a full days with school and ABA and speech; he seems to want to know he’ll be “doing something” or actually doing it and is sometimes distressed on weekends if there’s too much down time. But he tells us now when he does not want to do something; if just feels like sitting by the window, or running back and forth on the lawn, or jumping and doing some vaguely gymnastic moves on my bed. But he definitely does not want always to have to be “on” and I don’t push him to answer questions or talk all the time—-silence is a way of “speaking,” too.
Marcie
Mar 28, 2007 at 9:48 am
When I was a kid, most recesses and waits in the doctor’s offices was spent like this. As an adult, I can remember a friend thinking it was funny to point out “when I was in space”. I would get annoyed, because I knew I *needed* those spaced out times. It’s like it takes myself out of the heirarchy of cultural meanings and I don’t not have to worry about the effort it takes to navigate in the world. A time when I can “just be” and not think about maintaining an ego or the self. I think it’s the same thing Donna Williams refers to when she explains in her autiebiographies about walking down the street and having all meaning just drop out of everything.
gretchen
Mar 28, 2007 at 12:42 pm
Henry does something similiar: looking down to the left, and he’s usually smiling- sometimes even laughing. So I know it’s good for him!
Angel
Mar 29, 2007 at 7:42 pm
That reminds me… I used to be a 1:1 aide for a very bright little boy with autism, and he was often in that “zone” you’ve described! He was verbal, and eventually he told me what he was doing when he was staring into space like that (while sometimes also pacing around the room.) He had such a good visual memory that he could basically replay movies or video games in his head. Sometimes I could ask him, “Joey, what’s going on in your head?” and he’d say, “Super Monkey Ball… I’m on level 8″, or “The Aristokats” or something like that!
Kinda neat, huh?
Angel
Mar 29, 2007 at 7:42 pm
That reminds me… I used to be a 1:1 aide for a very bright little boy with autism, and he was often in that “zone” you’ve described! He was verbal, and eventually he told me what he was doing when he was staring into space like that (while sometimes also pacing around the room.) He had such a good visual memory that he could basically replay movies or video games in his head. Sometimes I could ask him, “Joey, what’s going on in your head?” and he’d say, “Super Monkey Ball… I’m on level 8″, or “The Aristokats” or something like that!
Kinda neat, huh?
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