Scientists finally discover the reasons behind our distractions

About 25 years ago, a few of Jonathan Smallwood's contemporaries believed it was a good idea for him to investigate mind-wandering. How could one ever hope to explore these impulsive and unpredictable thoughts that appear while people are not focused on their immediate environment or the work at hand? Imaginations that couldn't be correlated with any quantifiable external behavior? Yet Smallwood, who is currently attending Queen's University in Ontario, Canada, persisted. He employed a tiresome computer activity that was designed to mimic the kinds of distractions that lead us to add milk to someone else's coffee when they specifically requested black. And to have a better understanding of when and why minds stray, as well as what things they tend to wander toward, he began by asking research participants a few simple questions. After some time, he started to scan the participants' brains as well, to get a better idea of what was happening when their minds were roaming. Smallwood discovered that whereas happy minds frequently consider the future, unhappy minds frequently ruminate on the past. He also grew to believe that exploring our memories is essential to getting us ready for the future. Smallwood currently thinks mind-wandering is rarely a waste of time, despite the fact that some forms of it, like lingering on issues that can't be fixed, may be linked to depression. When our brain believes there isn't much else happening, it just tries to accomplish a little job. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Is mind-wandering the same thing as daydreaming, or would you say those are different? I believe it is the same procedure applied in a different setting. You can claim you're daydreaming when you're on vacation and have a lot of free time about what you want to do next. But you would have the same thoughts as mind-wandering when you were under pressure to perform. I believe it is more beneficial to discuss the underlying mechanisms, such as spontaneous thought or the decoupling of attention from perception, which occurs when our thoughts diverge from how we perceive the outside world. These two processes happen when we daydream or let our minds roam. It often takes us a while to catch ourselves mind-wandering. How can you catch it to study it in other people? We initially gave participants extremely dull experimental tasks, which caused a lot of mind-wandering. We would only sometimes inquire, "Are you daydreaming? " while the fMRI scanner monitored the brain's activity. But after conducting those kinds of studies for a while, I've come to the conclusion that most of the data we have will never tell us very much about how thinking functions in the real world, where people engage in activities like watching TV or going for a run. How and why did you decide to study mind-wandering? At the beginning of my profession, when I was young and naive, I began studying mind-wandering. At the time, I wasn't really sure why it wasn't being studied. The focus of psychology at the time was on observable, external behavior. That's not what I want to know about my thoughts, I thought to myself. What I'm curious to know is: Why do they arrive, where do they originate from, and why do they continue even when they distract us from the present moment?