Zoning out
I'll actually post the entire content here, 'cause paging in and out
means no fun at all.
And "no zoning out", by the way.
From here: http://discovermagazine.com/2009/jul-aug/15-brain-stop-paying-attention-zoning-out-crucial-mental-state
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The Brain Stop Paying Attention: Zoning Out Is a Crucial Mental State
Researchers say a wandering mind may be important to setting goals,
making discoveries, and living a balanced life.
by Carl Zimmer
I am going to do my best to hold your attention until the very last
word of this column. Actually, I know it’s futile. Along the way, your
mind will wander off, then return, then drift away again. But I can
console myself with some recent research on the subject of mind
wandering. Mind wandering is not necessarily the sign of a boring
column. It’s just one of the things that make us human.
Everybody knows what it is like for our minds to wander, and yet, for
a long time psychologists shied away from examining the experience. It
seemed too elusive and subjective to study scientifically. Only in the
past decade have they even measured just how common mind wandering is.
The answer is very.
Some of the most striking evidence comes from Jonathan Schooler, a
psychologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara who is
one of the leading researchers on mind wandering. In 2005 he and his
colleagues told a group of undergraduates to read the opening chapters
of War and Peace on a computer monitor and then to tap a key whenever
they realized they were not thinking about what they were reading. On
average, the students reported that their minds wandered 5.4 times in
a 45-minute session. Other researchers have gotten similar results
with simpler tasks, such as pronouncing words or pressing a button in
response to seeing particular letters and numbers. Depending on the
experiment, people spend up to half their time not thinking about the
task at hand—even when they’ve been told explicitly to pay attention.
Psychologists have also discovered ways to increase and decrease mind
wandering. Jonathan Smallwood, a colleague of Schooler’s at UC Santa
Barbara, instructed subjects to tap a key every time they saw a new
number appear on a computer screen but to hold off tapping if the
number was three. The more quickly the numbers came, the less often
the subjects’ minds wandered. 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.
Alcohol tweaks mind wandering in a particularly interesting way, as
Schooler and his colleagues report in a new paper entitled “Lost in
the Sauce,” published in Psychological Science. 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. That does not mean
that you should swill vodka if you want a laser focus on Tolstoy’s
deathless prose, though. Schooler has shown that there are, in fact,
two kinds of mind wandering: mind wandering when you are aware that
you’re thinking about something else and mind wandering without
awareness. He calls this second kind “zoning out.”
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. If people responded
to those questions with a yes, that meant they weren’t aware enough of
their own minds to report their mind wandering on their own. 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. We don’t
actually black out, of course, but we are more likely to make
mistakes, fail to encode memories, or miss a connection. 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. Just 30 percent of the people who were
zoning out at the key moments could give the villain’s pseudonym,
while 61 percent of the people who weren’t zoning out at those moments
succeeded.
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. To that end, Schooler and
Smallwood recently ran yet another experiment—this one in
collaboration with Alan Gordon of Stanford University, University of
British Columbia neuroscientist Kalina Christoff, and Christoff’s
graduate student Rachelle Smith. 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. From time to time they
asked the subjects if they were paying attention to the task; if they
hadn’t been, the researchers asked if they had been aware that their
mind had wandered. The subjects reported mind wandering 43 percent of
the time they were asked. In nearly half those cases, they said they
hadn’t been aware of their inattentiveness until the scientists asked.
Later, the scientists pored over the scans, looking closely at the
activity in people’s brains right before they were asked about their
state of mind. 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. Located mainly in the front of the brain, these
regions exert a top-down influence on our conscious and unconscious
thought, directing the brain’s activity toward important goals. The
other regions belong to another network called the default network. In
2001 a group led by neuroscientist Marcus Raichle at Washington
University discovered that this network was more active when people
were simply sitting idly in a brain scanner than when they were asked
to perform a particular task. The default network also becomes active
during certain kinds of self-referential thinking, such as reflecting
on personal experiences or picturing yourself in the future.
The fact that both of these important brain networks become active
together suggests that mind wandering is not useless mental static.
Instead, Schooler proposes, mind wandering allows us to work through
some important thinking. Our brains process information to reach
goals, but some of those goals are immediate while others are distant.
Somehow we have evolved a way to switch between handling the here and
now and contemplating long-term objectives. It may be no coincidence
that most of the thoughts that people have during mind wandering have
to do with the future.
Each of us has a magnificent hive of billions of neurons in our head.
Yet we find it difficult to stay focused for more than a few minutes
on even the easiest tasks.
Even more telling is the discovery that zoning out may be the most
fruitful type of mind wandering. In their fMRI study, Schooler and his
colleagues found that the default network and executive control
systems are even more active during zoning out than they are during
the less extreme mind wandering with awareness. When we are no longer
even aware that our minds are wandering, we may be able to think most
deeply about the big picture.
Because a fair amount of mind wandering happens without our ever
noticing, the solutions it lets us reach may come as a surprise. There
are many stories in the history of science of great discoveries
occurring to people out of the blue. The French mathematician Henri
Poincaré once wrote about how he struggled for two weeks with a
difficult mathematical proof. He set it aside to take a bus to a
geology conference, and the moment he stepped on the bus, the solution
came to him. It is possible that mind wandering led him to the
solution. John Kounios of Drexel University and his colleagues have
done brain scans that capture the moment when people have a sudden
insight that lets them solve a word puzzle. Many of the regions that
become active during those creative flashes belong to the default
network and the executive control system as well.
Of course, being permanently zoned out has its downside. It is one
thing to drift away for a few lines of War and Peace. But if you’re
pondering where you’ll be in five years as you drive through a busy
intersection, you may not be around in five years to find out. Our
brains delicately navigate between near-term and long-term thinking,
monitoring our own awareness to make sure that we are not missing
something vital. Perhaps, Schooler and Smallwood argue, the secret to
a good life is finding the balance between the two, the rhythm that
brings harmony to the different timescales at which we live.
And if you are staring at that last sentence and wondering what on
earth I’m talking about, you might want to scan back a few paragraphs
to find the spot where you zoned out. Honestly, I won’t mind.
