But as people practiced the task and became more familiar with it, their mind wandering increased. Smallwood has also found that mood affects mind wandering: If he showed people a short video about a sick dog before they performed the task, for example, they spent more time mind wandering than did a separate group that had watched a comedy clip.
The psychologists ran the War and Peace experiment again, but this time after serving their subjects some vodka with cranberry juice. Drunk readers actually reported less mind wandering than sober people did. To determine which kind of mind wandering people experience, Schooler and his collaborators told the participants in the War and Peace experiment to report their own drifting but also asked them every few minutes if they were thinking of something else.
These experiments show that we spend about 13 percent of our time zoning out. But when we are drunk, that figure doubles. In other words, inebriated subjects report less mind wandering only because they are less aware of their own minds. When our minds wander, we lose touch with the outside world. Zoning out makes us particularly prone to these errors.
Schooler and Smallwood, along with Merrill McSpadden of the University of British Columbia, tested the effect of zoning out by having a test group read a Sherlock Holmes mystery in which a villain used a pseudonym.
As people were reading the passages discussing this fact, the researchers checked their state of attentiveness. These results are shocking when you stop to think about them. Each of us has a magnificent hive of billions of neurons in our head, joined to each other by trillions of connections.
The human brain is arguably the most complex organ in the natural world. And yet studies on mind wandering are showing that we find it difficult to stay focused for more than a few minutes on even the easiest tasks, despite the fact that we make mistakes whenever we drift away.
Neuroscientists are investigating this paradox by searching for the signatures of mind wandering in the brain. The researchers put people in a functional magnetic resonance imaging fMRI scanner and gave them the standard press-a-key-unless-you-see-three test. The subjects reported mind wandering 43 percent of the time they were asked. Overall, people who said they were mind wandering had a pattern of brain activity quite different from those who were focused on the task.
The regions of the brain that become active during mind wandering belong to two important networks. One is known as the executive control system. The other regions belong to another network called the default network.
Sometimes, it is used as a coping mechanism to stop yourself from thinking about the immediate pain or suffering. Therefore, it would only help to become aware of the pattern — for instance, when do you ruminate, what are some of the most typical thoughts you ruminate about — to get yourself out of this vicious loop of negative thoughts. Anubhuti Matta is an associate editor with The Swaddle.
Zoning out is a natural human tendency, a sign that the mind is working to fix something. Follow us. Newsletter Exclusive news delivered to your inbox. Wandering Minds. Nov 20, Share. Tags brains inner workings Wandering Minds. See all articles by Anubhuti. Latest Science articles. Early To Rise. Scientists believe Jharkhand's Singhbhum region was exposed to air over 3.
By Devrupa Rakshit. This finding is an astonishing milestone in our search for life, raising questions about the evolution of the universe. And what's really going on in the brain when you zone out? Well, in many ways, this momentary mental vacation serves as a preservation tactic; one your body can tap into whenever it's overwhelmed.
Instead, our bodies and minds opt to partially shut down in order to survive. Of course, on the average day, you probably won't need to actually fight, flee, or freeze , "but we respond in these ways to the smaller 'threats' of modern life," Ewing says. Since you aren't going to fight off or flee from these stressors, the only option left is to freeze, and enter into that fuzzy-headed, blank mental state.
And it's all stemming from deep inside your brain. It's a natural response to stress , she says, and one that we share with animals.
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