Mind Wandering: Do You Know Why It Creates Better Learners?
Humans spend about half of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they’re doing in the present. A now-famous Harvard study illuminated this reality, using an iPhone app that pinged participants at random times throughout the day and asked them what they were thinking about. Mind wandering?
It found that 50% of the time, their minds were wandering from their current task. Also, they were significantly less happy when their minds were roaming than when they were focused on the present.
This is probably because of most of the time; the mind is just generating noise and gibberish. Gibberish like worries, memories, reenactments of the way things should have been, and projections of the future. It’s easy to get swept up in our thoughts, and sometimes it’s addictive.
Mind-wandering allows one part of the brain to focus on the task at hand, and another part of the brain to keep a higher goal in mind. Christoff (2009) at the University of California, Santa Barbara has evidence that people whose minds wander a lot are more creative and better problem solvers. Their brains have them working on the task at hand but simultaneously processing other information and making connections.
A wandering mind takes more in: good and bad. This leads to new ideas. But it can take you up — and it can take you down.
Focus doesn’t allow the noise in. But the noise is what allows creativity to spark.
You already have rituals that put you into a zone; you just may not realize it. What you want to do is use them deliberately
But it’s not very pleasant, as most of us know and studies have found, and it’s not great for mental health over the long term.
Build a team whose members have diverse backgrounds and mindsets. This broadens the creativity process.
Each person will contribute different thoughts and ideas, which lead to unique conversations when everyone comes together. The education, background, and experience of individual members lead to a creative group.
Team members will learn from one another. Different perspectives lead to new skills and effective innovation strategies. The result is a stronger team equipped to take on new challenges and quickly solve problems of all sizes.
If you feel like your mind is everywhere but in the present, here are some of the methods that both history and science have proved work to pull yourself back into the present.
How do you get focused? How do you unwind? Here is why mind wandering leads to the best learning. Start using these more deliberate techniques, and you can make yourself happier as well as more creative when you need to be.
Wandering is the mind’s natural state
The most common view of the human mind assumes that our normal way of thinking consists of concentrated focus upon immediate tasks at hand. But researchers have found that this is not the case.
Daydreaming is now considered to be the normal state of our minds, with focus appearing as a break from the more common mind wandering. A recent study has found that our mind wanders forty-seven percent of the time we are awake with very few activities not equally peppered with natural periods of daydreaming.
The fact that daydreaming is the natural state of the human brain suggests that those who take most naturally to daydreaming will best exhibit the skills necessary for successfully navigating the human world. Far from representing a lack of discipline, daydreaming is a hallmark of a healthy and active human mind.
Breathe
This is a great method because it’s one that works even if you don’t believe it will. People have used breathing to calm their nervous systems over millennia, and science has recently shown why it works, neurologically.
There’s a cluster of cells in the brainstem that controls different types of breathing—sighing, laughing, gasping, and others. A slow breathing subgroup was identified earlier this year, by researchers who also noted its projections to higher areas of the brain, involved in arousal and wakefulness.
Have a mini-interaction with nature
Lots of evidence spending time out in nature helps mood, well being, and stress levels. But not everyone can jaunt out to the forest when they’re feeling overwhelmed. Interestingly, a new study reported that just a momentary interaction with an item of nature had a big influence on mental health.
Meditate
This is probably one of the hardest things to make yourself do in a moment of anxiety, but it also may be the best. Though meditation has been linked to myriad neurological and psychological benefits over the long term, luckily most experts agree that even a few minutes of sitting and focusing the mind can do a lot to calm it.
Mindfulness training has been shown to quiet the areas of the brain that are responsible for the chattering of the monkey mind—and within seconds. So try sitting and focusing on anything you choose—the breath; a short mantra, either in your head or aloud; the sounds in the room or outside.
Every time your mind wanders, simply note that, and bring it back to what you were focusing on. That’s what the practice is—redirecting our attention, again and again.
Motivation
It’s a truism that our “dreams,” by which we usually mean our goals and desires, motivated in life. What is less recognized, however, is the central role played by the process of daydreaming in envisioning and imaginatively experiencing the lives we wish to lead and people we want to become.
Our goals and desires are what they are because we have spent time freely living through our daydreams what it would be like to achieve them. For these reasons, daydreaming in learners is related to higher levels of ambition and a deeper sense of motivation.
Increased insight
Did you ever wonder what causes that moment of insight when something suddenly clicks, or a solution becomes clear? The answer is a lot of hard work on the part of your brain that goes unnoticed.
Moments of insight, those sudden revelations that seem to come from nowhere, are long prepared for through the brain’s ongoing hidden organizing and processing. Daydreaming, as a mental state activating both the default and executive networks of the brain, plays an important role in that organizing and processing. What you may think is your mind drifting is your mind actively forming connections between information, synthesizing what was previously only chaos, and preparing the ground for the moment when things suddenly fit into place.
Confidence
Freely imagining “what you would do if…” is far from idle. Having envisioned scenarios and played out possible events gives us an increasing sense that we can handle them.
In this way, the imaginative anticipation that often occurs in daydreaming contributes as much to a robust sense of confidence as it does to a healthy motivation.
Think about it this way; daydreaming is a training ground for your mind where it plays through and sometimes struggles with scenarios it has not experienced or wants to react differently to in the future.
Though successful training certainly doesn’t guarantee success during the real event, it does provide a mental preparedness and a firm sense that no matter what may occur we can deal with it.
For this reason, some of the most confident learners are also those with the healthiest daydreaming lives.
Talk to someone
Being stuck in your head can be destructive partly because there’s no real order to the monologue, and no sounding board to help put things in perspective.
And part of the reason that therapy, talking to a friend, and even journaling are all effective in reining in mind is that they provide perspective—the very act of crafting your thoughts into a coherent narrative helps you understand them better.
Creative thinking can be an extension of ordinary mind-wandering, the researchers explained, and a growing body of research has linked daydreaming with creativity.
In highly creative people, psychologists have observed a tendency toward a variation on mind-wandering known as “positive-constructive daydreaming,” in which has also been associated with self-awareness, goal-oriented thinking, and increased compassion.
As this study suggests, a healthy amount of daydreaming is connected to improved critical thinking capabilities, an invaluable characteristic in successful learners.
It has also been shown that daydreaming is dramatically more present in those considered to be of superior intelligence when compared with learners of average intelligence.
Split second thinking
In his book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking Malcolm Gladwell discusses the phenomenon of “thin-slicing,” the mind’s jumping to conclusions based on surprisingly little information.
Despite what we tend to assume, Gladwell demonstrates that jumping to conclusions based on limited information is often statistically the most reliable way to arrive at the right decision.
The key point about thin-slicing is that its effectiveness depends upon two factors. Knowledge, especially when derived from experience, and mental integration that allows for swift access to the knowledge and experience we have gained.
If we return to our image of daydreaming as the training ground of the mind, the increased integration it imposes on knowledge and experience we have collected improves our ability to jump to conclusions based on little information successfully.
It makes us more successful thin-slicers and improves our split-second decision making.
Better problem solving
Better problem solving.
What is problem-solving? From what we have already said we might suggest it is an effective use of the default and executive networks of the brain resulting in increased intelligence, critical thinking, insight, and thin-slicing.
The argument that the integration of default and executive networks results in improved problem solving is offered by the author of Daydreams at Work: Wake Up Your Creative Powers, Amy Fries. In an article in Psychology Today: “…your mind-wandering capacity is like that computer program–it can get to solutions that your conscious mind just can’t see.”
In general, daydreaming makes us better thinkers. Being better thinkers makes us better learners.
Staying cool
The traditional view of daydreaming understands it as a form of escapism.
We are unhappy or uninterested in where we are and so imagine we are somewhere else. It is important, this view assumes, to resist this escapist urge and instead cope with the world as it is. It turns out. However, that daydreaming is itself a central element of our mental coping mechanisms.
As already mentioned, daydreaming provides the brain with the exercise course where it can secretly play out different solutions to problems.
More than this, however, those precious daydreaming moments allow us the conscious rest necessary to face difficult tasks or situations with a fresh mind.
During these seeming moments of rest, the brain is still hard at work beneath the surface organizing potential responses without the awkward interference of conscious thought.
The bottom line
Coping is a key element of mental elasticity, the ability to shift our thought and behavior smoothly in response to changing situations and information.
Daydreaming, as the practice ground for mental processing, greatly increases the mind’s ability to shift in the face of unanticipated events and situations smoothly.
So while daydreaming clearly contributes to organizing information and experience we have already learned, making the learned material more useful by improving our ability to apply it, it also enhances our response time in the face of the unexpected.
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Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
