ABC04 – Mindful wandering
Post #4 of my homebrew April blogging challenge. Words: approximately 1,000.
A wandering mind is an unhappy mind, according to Killingsworth & Gilbert (2010). (The one-page article is available through Berkeley.)
My summary: from an evolutionary perspective, the human capacity and tendency to think of the past, future, or alternative present helps us to anticipate the unknown, through learning or reasoning or planning. Philosophically and religiously though? This tendency causes humans to suffer. It's our blessing and curse.
The researchers developed an app to facilitate large-scale experience sampling. Users of the app got randomly pinged and had to reply with what was on their mind, how they were feeling, what they were doing. Given the large sample and generated data for analysis, three findings emerged:
- Our minds wander frequently regardless of what we're doing (even love-making is not immune to this). What we're doing has meh impact on whether our minds wander, and no impact on the pleasantness of our thoughts when our minds do wander.
- People are less happy when their minds wandered than when they did not. When we think pleasant thoughts, it doesn't make us happier than in the moment. Yet when we have neutral or unpleasant thoughts, we become unhappy regardless of what we're doing in the moment. The authors acknowledge that negative moods can cause mind wandering, but their analysis suggests that mind wandering is the cause rather than simply the consequence of unhappiness.
- What people think is a better predictor of happiness than what people do. Statistically speaking, mind wandering explained the variance in happiness better than what people were doing. Furthermore, mind wandering was mostly independent of the nature of activities in this analysis of variance, implying that they're independent influences. In other words, we can extrapolate and say it's not necessary to be doing pleasant things and having pleasant thoughts to feel happy; one can be doing something tedious or even unpleasant and still be happy if they maintain pleasant thoughts.
I wanted to share this piece for my blog post today for a few reasons.
Partly to practice communicating academic work plainly and succinctly (though, the source article is already straightforward); to highlight the points while inviting those who are curious to delve deeper into the work.
Partly to share content that's ever-relevant for humans: what does it mean to lead a fulfilling/meaningful/happy life? My default mode is to approach this question through introspection of my thoughts and feelings, but on occasion it's nice to be reminded that what I'm going through is an essentially human conundrum. In recent months I've been reading up on Stoic philosophy and Buddhism and Hinduism, and the common element across all three is to regard the present moment as all a person truly has in life. It's nice to see that this proposition has support from the realm of modern science, too.
Partly to process the implications of the study in an open forum. Compared to religious scriptures and fragments of philosophical discourses, Killingsworth & Gilbert's (2010) piece is very recent. But consider that 2010 was squarely in the "Before Times": before the proliferation of AI, before Covid-19, before the rise of global right-wing populism (e.g., Brexit in the UK, Trump's first presidential term in the US, Bolsonaro in Brazil, etc.). Other noteworthy pendulum swings in the social sphere: the crises (plural, of course) in the Middle East, the Russo–Ukrainian war, the murders of George Floyd and Michael Brown and so many others, the increase of addictive technologies and dark patterns on the web... a lot has happened since 2010.
So if it was difficult then to focus on the moment, then it's arguably more difficult to do so today. The collective consciousness of humanity has had to, within a concentrated amount of time, endure what Carl Jung called "psychic infections." It's hard to feel justifiably optimistic about the future nowadays, and I wonder what this means for wandering minds.
Speaking for myself, I tend to think about the past in terms of when I had it good (now that those times are gone, naturally), or when the world felt safer (even when it was due to naïveté). I tend to think about the future in terms of what causes me anxiety, the likelihood of my goals being realized, and what the world might look like given its current velocities. I try to experience the present, despite how taxing it is to self-direct my attention. Some consolation: I can report that I have enough success to warrant continued efforts.
For instance, it's been one week since I decided to quit Reddit cold turkey. (Of all my posts to date, it's received the most toasts, and that contributed to my motivation.) That's one week away from the noise, from prompts that encourage doom-scrolling, from exposure to infections of the psyche. But it wasn't a perfect streak: although I blocked myself from Reddit, I visited NPR and Reuters and AP News to glance at headlines. I also went down a Linux rabbit hole (never a dull moment in this ecosystem lol) to catch up on the controversy of age verification at the operation system level, systemd and its inclusion of a DOB field, and the ongoing contest of open source software development versus corporate interests.
In short, I traded one diversion for others. They were not actions I consciously sought to take, but reactions during some dull moment. But I've learned to not let this get me down. If I give up now and revert, then I'm back at square one. It's a success in my books to have gone a week without Reddit, and I know it'll get easier over time. My task now is to use the awareness of my tendency for self-distraction to make refinements.
Ultimately, my takeaway from the Killingsworth & Gilbert (2010) piece is that minimizing mind wandering is a worthwhile endeavour. Elimination of mind wandering is not the goal; it's a natural human tendency, after all. Yet that tendency, helpful in terms of evolution, is rendered unhelpful or self-harming in an environment that profits from wandering minds—that profits from our collective unhappiness.