Notably, however, the consequences of mind wandering extend beyond the qualitative content of decoupled thinking itself, and the adaptive value it provides our species (for a review, see Schooler et al., 2011). These findings and others have all helped elucidate the nature of thoughts inside the wandering mind. Further, when mind wandering in their daily lives, individuals also report being less happy, regardless of whether their thoughts were unpleasant or neutral ( Killingsworth and Gilbert, 2010). These task-unrelated thoughts are also more likely to concern personal issues instead of unfocused daydreams ( McVay et al., 2009), underscoring their utility. For example, in terms of what our minds focus on when they wander, we are more likely to think about the future than the past or present, an effect that has been linked to strategic planning ( Smallwood et al., 2011). Indeed, our proclivity to mind wander is sufficiently hard-wired that despite the best of our will power, these “decoupled” thoughts occur whether we want them to or not ( Braboszcz et al., 2010).Ī key issue in the scientific study of mind wandering concerns understanding the qualitative content of decoupled thoughts ( McVay et al., 2009 Killingsworth and Gilbert, 2010 Smallwood et al., 2011). In these instances, our minds become decoupled from stimulus events in the external environment, a regular and periodic experience that occupies a notable portion of our mental life (e.g., Klinger and Cox, 1987 Smallwood and Schooler, 2006 Killingsworth and Gilbert, 2010). From planning for the weekend to fantasizing about our next vacation, we easily get lost in our own thoughts, especially when performing well-practiced tasks such as driving or washing dishes. Mind wandering is the ubiquitous phenomenon in which our minds drift away from perceptual and cognitive demands of the immediate external environment to focus on the internal milieu. Taken together, these observations suggest the sensory-motor consequences of decoupled thinking are integral to normal and pathological neurocognitive states. We then consider sensory-motor attenuation in a class of clinical neurocognitive disorders that have ties to pathological patterns of decoupling, reviews suggesting that mind wandering and these clinical states may share a common mechanism of sensory-motor attenuation. First, we describe the range of widespread sensory, cognitive and motor processes attenuated during mind wandering states, and how this impacts our neurocognitive processing of external events. In this review, we examine an underappreciated aspect of this phenomenon – attenuation of sensory-motor processing – from two perspectives. From a neurocognitive perspective, it has been proposed that during mind wandering, our executive resources are decoupled from the external environment and directed to these internal thoughts.
UNCONTROLLED THOUGHT TRAIN FREE
Attentional Neuroscience Lab, Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, CanadaĪ unique human characteristic is our ability to mind wander – a state in which we are free to engage in thoughts that are not directly tied to sensations and perceptions from our immediate physical environment.
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