It's interesting how mind wandering can be analysed from different perspectives:

1. In meditation the main goal is precisely to free ourselves from the monkey mind that seems to be the cause of all suffering

2. In neuroscience mind wandering is seen as the brain default mode unless we are operating within a goal driven mindset

3. This can also be seen as a kind of reinforcement learning: we train ourselves to notice when we are mind wandering - this process in itself, after some time, conditions the mind to focus on the present moment

4. From a metabolic perspective (e.g. ketogenic therapy), mind wandering can be seen as the result of blood glucose fluctuations that cause mental fogginess and impair focus

In my own experience as a long time meditation practitioner, what really made the difference for me was regulating my blood glucose levels by following a ketogenic diet. The change in clarity of mind and focus were life changing to me.

I write a bit on my experience in my blog:

https://www.feelingbuggy.com/p/how-the-ketogenic-diet-helped...

Just my 2 cents on a fascinating subject!

My personal goal is to make my mental happenings more visible in order to understand where I get off track while tackling a task.

I think knowledge work in general is plagued by the intangibility of the processes that lead to its artifacts.

Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) has a few things to say about this. (Here's Jonathan Bricker's TedX talk for a glimpse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTb3d5cjSFI&themeRefresh=1)

And a lot of what ACT does happens to echo what Buddhists are trying to do in meditation.

Maybe the most important aspect of mind wandering -- ie distraction -- is: what pushes us off track? In my experience, that's often a feeling of discomfort that is tied to the anticipated pain of a task. Sometimes that pain is tedium (I know what must be done and don't want to do it), other times it's complexity (I know I must do something but the exact steps are not clear), and other times it's sheer difficulty; ie I'm not breaking the task down into small enough chunks to feel able to do them.

I'm looking for my own internal protocol to sense mind wandering, identify which type of perceived difficulty caused it, and then take the steps to stay on goal: if tedium, put on podcast and forge forth; if complexity, back up and unravel the vague aspiration; if sheer difficulty, break it down into small steps.

I feel like the very ability to slip into metacognitive reflection depends heavily on my overall state, whether I'm doing all the right things like sleeping and exercising in order to monitor the internal course of work.

For me, undirected mind wandering (daydreaming, background processing, actual dreaming and similar states) seems to be the best source of creative thought as well as flashes of insight. And semi-directed mind wandering (brainstorming as well as random walks down pathways of thought) seems to be essential to problem solving.

However, schools and workplaces rarely appreciate any form of thinking that doesn't produce immediate tangible output with some kind of economic value.

Does mind wandering in this context refer to daydreaming or does it refer to blanking out? As someone with late-diagnosed ADHD and likely also on the spectrum, I find myself struggling with both of these. I engage in a lot of Walter Mitty-esque hyper realistic daydreams, but I also have random periods of minutes of completely blank mind. Both result in a lot of "lost time" for me throughout the day. It runs in my family such we refer to it as "the our-surname fog".

Skimming this paper it's unclear to me whether the author is referring to one or the other, or both.

Interestingly I'm not sure that the mind wandering is separable from my creativity and problem solving. Often I'll come out of a blank period with the answer to something without consciously having been thinking about it. I think of these periods of "lost time" in my day as background processing - it's just my misfortune I live in a world where it's not socially or economically acceptable to space out for long periods throughout the day.

Mind wandering (or more precisely the activation of the default mode network) and dreaming are hugely linked. Interestingly the “direction” of the mind wandering during rem sleep is the inverse of anxious mind wandering. When we are anxious we have high levels of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine, but during rem sleep it’s 85% below base waking levels.

In 2017 I wrote a paper discussing the implications for dream content and functionality. Here is the link for it:

https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/k6trz

And it was discussed on HN here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143590

Thanks for posting. Reminds me of Dan Gilbert's famous paper on the subject. He took polls of people at random times during the day when smartphones first emerged.

"In conclusion, a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost."

https://dtg.sites.fas.harvard.edu/KILLINGSWORTH%20&%20GILBER...

After skimming the article, I found it unconvincing. It feels poorly structured, almost like something a high school student might put together for a monograph. The references seem to be there to add a sense of authority, but they lack clarity. Who exactly is the article referring to? Is it talking about all human beings, specific types of people like artists, or perhaps Einstein when he was daydreaming?

There are plenty of successful people who possess this trait the article critiques, which makes me wonder if one strong counterexample is enough to challenge the entire premise. In my view, the argument lacks depth and fails to consider broader, real-world examples.