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Consciousness and Cognition

Giulia Poerio

Mind-wandering is closely connected with negative mood. Whether negative mood is a cause or consequence of mind-wandering remains an important, unresolved, issue. We sought to clarify the direction of this relationship by measuring mood before and after mind-wandering. We also measured the affective content, time-orientation and relevance of mind-wandering to current concerns to explore whether the link between mind-wandering and negative mood might be explained by these characteristics. A novel experience-sampling technique with smartphone application prompted participants to answer questions about mind-wandering and mood across 7days. While sadness tended to precede mind-wandering, mind-wandering itself was not associated with later mood and only predicted feeling worse if its content was negative. We also found prior sadness predicted retrospective mind-wandering, and prior negative mood predicted mind-wandering to current concerns. Our findings provide new insight into how mood and mind-wandering relate but suggest mind-wandering is not inherently detrimental to well-being.

Frontiers in Psychology

Jessica Andrews-hanna

Consciousness and cognition

Peter Totterdell

Lynden Miles

D. Stawarczyk

Julia W Y Kam

James Broadway

Haakon Engen

Zachary Irving

Although mind-wandering research is rapidly progressing, stark disagreements are emerging about what the term “mind-wandering” means. Four prominent views define mind-wandering as 1) task-unrelated thought, 2) stimulus-independent thought, 3) unintentional thought, or 4) dynamically unguided thought. Although theorists claim to capture the ordinary understanding of mind-wandering, no systematic studies have assessed these claims. Two large factorial studies present participants (n=545) with vignettes that describe someone’s thoughts and ask whether her mind was wandering, while systematically manipulating features relevant to the four major accounts of mind-wandering. Dynamics explains between four and twenty times more variance in participants’ mind-wandering judgments than other features. Our third study (n=153) tests and supports a unique prediction of the dynamic framework—obsessive rumination contrasts with mind-wandering. Our final study (n=277) used vignettes that resemble mi...

Siqing GUAN

The intentionality and content dimensions of mind wandering (MW) are important determinants of its costs and benefits. However, the relationship of intentionality with various combinations of different content dimensions has never been examined. In this study, we aimed to examine whether the content of intentional and unintentional MW differs in terms of temporal orientation, emotional valence, and combinations of these two factors. Results indicated that intentional and unintentional MW did not differ in the frequency of negative valence, whereas a difference was observed in the frequency of negative valence combined with temporal orientation. Unintentional MW was 4.88 times more likely than intentional MW to generate negative past-oriented content, while intentional MW was 2.61 times more likely to generate negative future-oriented content. Furthermore, when compared to intentional MW, unintentional MW was 1.94 times more likely to generate neutral past-oriented content, while int...

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A wandering mind is an unhappy mind

Affiliation.

• 1 Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. [email protected]
• PMID: 21071660
• DOI: 10.1126/science.1192439

We developed a smartphone technology to sample people's ongoing thoughts, feelings, and actions and found (i) that people are thinking about what is not happening almost as often as they are thinking about what is and (ii) found that doing so typically makes them unhappy.

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• TED Speaker

Matt Killingsworth

Why you should listen.

While doing his PhD research with Dan Gilbert at Harvard, Matt Killingsworth invented a nifty tool for investigating happiness: an iPhone app called Track Your Happiness that captured feelings in real time. (Basically, it pings you at random times and asks: How are you feeling right now, and what are you doing?) Data captured from the study became the landmark paper "A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind" ( PDF ). 

As an undergrad, Killingsworth studied economics and engineering, and worked for a few years as a software product manager -- an experience during which, he says, "I began to question my assumptions about what defined success for an individual, an organization, or a society." He's now a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar examining such topics as "the relationship between happiness and the content of everyday experiences, the percentage of everyday experiences that are intrinsically valuable, and the degree of congruence between the causes of momentary happiness and of one’s overall satisfaction with life."

Matt Killingsworth’s TED talk

Want to be happier? Stay in the moment

More news and ideas from matt killingsworth, dear ted: “how can i be happier at work”.

Smart advice from TED speakers to help you rediscover your joy on the job

The power of daydreams: 4 studies on the surprising science of mind-wandering

[ted id=1607 width=560 height=315] What makes us happy? It’s one of the most complicated puzzles of human existence — and one that, so far, 87 speakers have explored in TEDTalks. In today’s talk, Matt Killingsworth (who studied under Dan Gilbert at Harvard) shares a novel approach to the study of happiness — an app, Track Your Happiness, […]

November 24, 2010

A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy One

New research underlines the wisdom of being absorbed in what you do

By Jason Castro

We spend billions of dollars each year looking for happiness, hoping it might be bought, consumed, found, or flown to. Other, more contemplative cultures and traditions assure us that this is a waste of time (not to mention money). ‘Be present’ they urge. Live in the moment, and there you’ll find true contentment.

Sure enough, our most fulfilling experiences are typically those that engage us body and mind, and are unsullied by worry or regret. In these cases, a relationship between focus and happiness is easy to spot. But does this relationship hold in general, even for simple, everyday activities? Is a focused mind a happy mind? Harvard psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert decided to find out.

In a recent study published in Science, Killingsworth and Gilbert discovered that an unnervingly large fraction of our thoughts - almost half - are not related to what we’re doing. Surprisingly, we tended to be elsewhere even for casual and presumably enjoyable activities, like watching TV or having a conversation. While you might hope all this mental wandering is taking us to happier places, the data say otherwise. Just like the wise traditions teach, we’re happiest when thought and action are aligned, even if they’re only aligned to wash dishes.

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The ingredients of simple, everyday happiness are tough to study in the lab, and aren’t easily measured with a standard experimental battery of forced choices, eye-tracking, and questionnaires. Day to day happiness is simply too fleeting. To really study it’s causes, you need to catch people in the act of feeling good or feeling bad in real-world settings.

To do this, the researchers used a somewhat unconventional, but powerful, technique known as experience sampling. The idea behind it is simple. Interrupt people at unpredictable intervals and ask them what they’re doing, and what’s on their minds. If you do this many times a day for many days, you can start to assemble a kind of quantitative existential portrait of someone. Do this for many people, and you can find larger patterns and tendencies in human thought and behavior, allowing you to correlate moments of happiness with particular kinds of thought and action.

To sample our inner lives, the team developed an iPhone app that periodically surveyed people’s thoughts and activities. At random times throughout the day, a participant’s iPhone would chime, and present him with a brief questionnaire that asked how happy he was (on a scale from 1-100), what he was doing, and if he was thinking about what he was doing. If subjects were indeed thinking of something else, they reported whether that something else was pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant. Responses to the questions were standardized, which allowed them to be neatly summarized in a database that tracked the collective moods, actions, and musings of about 5000 total participants (a subset of 2250 people was used in the present study).

In addition to awakening us to just how much our minds wander, the study clearly showed that we’re happiest when thinking about what we’re doing. Although imagining pleasant alternatives was naturally preferable to imagining unpleasant ones, the happiest scenario was to not be imagining at all. A person who is ironing a shirt and thinking about ironing is happier than a person who is ironing and thinking about a sunny getaway.

What about the kinds of activities we do, though? Surely, the hard-partiers and world travelers among us are happier than the quiet ones who stay at home and tuck in early? Not necessarily. According to the data from the Harvard group’s study, the particular way you spend your day doesn’t tell much about how happy you are. Mental presence - the matching of thought to action - is a much better predictor of happiness.

The happy upshot of this study is that it suggests a wonderfully simple prescription for greater happiness: think about what you’re doing. But be warned that like any prescription, following it is very different from just knowing it’s good for you. In addition to the usual difficulties of breaking bad or unhelpful habits, your brain may also be wired to work against your attempts stay present.

Recent fMRI scanning studies show that even when we’re quietly at rest and following instructions to think of nothing in particular, our brains settle into a conspicuous pattern of activity that corresponds to mind-wandering. This signature ‘resting’ activity is coordinated across several widespread brain areas , and is argued by many to be evidence of a brain network that is active by default. Under this view our brains climb out of the default state when we’re bombarded with input, or facing a challenging task, but tend to slide back into it once things quiet down.

Why are our brains so intent on tuning out? One possibility is that they’re calibrated for a target level of arousal. If a task is dull and can basically be done on autopilot, the brain conjures up its own exciting alternatives and sends us off and wandering. This view is somewhat at odds with the Killingsworth and Gilbert’s findings though, since subjects wandered even on ‘engaging’ activities. Another, more speculative possibility is that wandering corresponds to some important mental housekeeping or regulatory process that we’re not conscious of. Perhaps while we check out, disparate bits of memory and experience are stitched together into a coherent narrative – our sense of self.

Of course, it’s also possible that wandering isn’t really ‘for’ anything, but rather just a byproduct of a brain in a world that doesn’t punish the occasional (or even frequent) flight of fancy. Regardless of what prompts our brains to settle into the default mode, its tendency to do so may be the kiss of death for happiness. As the authors of the paper elegantly summarize their work: “a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.” 

On the plus side, a mind can be trained to wander less. With regular and dedicated meditation practice, you can certainly become much more present, mindful, and content. But you’d better be ready to work. The most dramatic benefits only really accrue for individuals, often monks, who have clocked many thousands of hours practicing the necessary skills (it’s not called the default state for nothing).

The next steps in this work will be fascinating to see, and we can certainly expect to see more results from the large data set collected by Killingsworth and Gilbert. It will be interesting to know, for example, how much people vary in their tendency to wander, and whether differences in wandering are associated with psychiatric ailments. If so, we may be able to tailor therapeutic interventions for people prone to certain cognitive styles that put them at risk for depression, anxiety, or other disorders.

In addition to the translational potential of this work, it will also be exciting to understand the brain networks responsible for wandering, and whether there are trigger events that send the mind into the wandering or focused state. Though wandering may be bad for happiness, it is still fascinating to wonder why we do it.

Are you a scientist? Have you recently read a peer-reviewed paper that you want to write about? Then contact Mind Matters co-editor Gareth Cook, a Pulitzer prize -winning journalist at the Boston Globe, where he edits the Sunday Ideas section. He can be reached at garethideas AT gmail.com

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Harvard psychologists Matthew A. Killingsworth (right) and Daniel T. Gilbert (left) used a special “track your happiness” iPhone app to gather research. The results: We spend at least half our time thinking about something other than our immediate surroundings, and most of this daydreaming doesn’t make us happy.

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Wandering mind not a happy mind

Steve Bradt

Harvard Staff Writer

About 47% of waking hours spent thinking about what isn’t going on

People spend 46.9 percent of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they’re doing, and this mind-wandering typically makes them unhappy. So says a study that used an iPhone Web app to gather 250,000 data points on subjects’ thoughts, feelings, and actions as they went about their lives.

The research, by psychologists Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert of Harvard University, is described this week in the journal Science .

“A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind,” Killingsworth and Gilbert write. “The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost.”

Unlike other animals, humans spend a lot of time thinking about what isn’t going on around them: contemplating events that happened in the past, might happen in the future, or may never happen at all. Indeed, mind-wandering appears to be the human brain’s default mode of operation.

To track this behavior, Killingsworth developed an iPhone app that contacted 2,250 volunteers at random intervals to ask how happy they were, what they were currently doing, and whether they were thinking about their current activity or about something else that was pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant.

Subjects could choose from 22 general activities, such as walking, eating, shopping, and watching television. On average, respondents reported that their minds were wandering 46.9 percent of time, and no less than 30 percent of the time during every activity except making love.

“Mind-wandering appears ubiquitous across all activities,” says Killingsworth, a doctoral student in psychology at Harvard. “This study shows that our mental lives are pervaded, to a remarkable degree, by the nonpresent.”

Killingsworth and Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, found that people were happiest when making love, exercising, or engaging in conversation. They were least happy when resting, working, or using a home computer.

“Mind-wandering is an excellent predictor of people’s happiness,” Killingsworth says. “In fact, how often our minds leave the present and where they tend to go is a better predictor of our happiness than the activities in which we are engaged.”

The researchers estimated that only 4.6 percent of a person’s happiness in a given moment was attributable to the specific activity he or she was doing, whereas a person’s mind-wandering status accounted for about 10.8 percent of his or her happiness.

Time-lag analyses conducted by the researchers suggested that their subjects’ mind-wandering was generally the cause, not the consequence, of their unhappiness.

“Many philosophical and religious traditions teach that happiness is to be found by living in the moment, and practitioners are trained to resist mind wandering and to ‘be here now,’” Killingsworth and Gilbert note in Science. “These traditions suggest that a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.”

This new research, the authors say, suggests that these traditions are right.

Killingsworth and Gilbert’s 2,250 subjects in this study ranged in age from 18 to 88, representing a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds and occupations. Seventy-four percent of study participants were American.

More than 5,000 people are now using the iPhone Web app .

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A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind

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Citation Count

The default network and self-generated thought: component processes, dynamic control, and clinical relevance

Facebook use predicts declines in subjective well-being in young adults., the science of mind wandering: empirically navigating the stream of consciousness, meditation experience is associated with differences in default mode network activity and connectivity, the brain's default network and its adaptive role in internal mentation., a default mode of brain function., the brain's default network anatomy, function, and relevance to disease, well-being : the foundations of hedonic psychology, a survey method for characterizing daily life experience: the day reconstruction method, wandering minds: the default network and stimulus-independent thought, related papers (5), the restless mind, experience sampling during fmri reveals default network and executive system contributions to mind wandering, for whom the mind wanders, and when: an experience-sampling study of working memory and executive control in daily life., frequently asked questions (10), q1. what have the authors contributed in "a wandering mind is an unhappy mind" .

The most reliable method for investigating real-world emotion is experience sampling, which involves contacting people as they engage in their everyday activities and asking them to report their thoughts, feelings, and actions at that moment.   The authors solved this problem by developing aWeb application for the iPhone ( Apple Incorporated, Cupertino, California ), which they used to create an unusually large database of real-time reports of thoughts, feelings, and actions of a broad range of people as they went about their daily activities.   To find out how often people ’ s minds wander, what topics they wander to, and how those wanderings affect their happiness, the authors analyzed samples from 2250 adults ( 58. 8 % male, 73. 9 % residing in the United States, mean age of 34 years ) who were randomly assigned to answer a happiness question ( “ How are you feeling right now ? ” ) answered on a continuous sliding scale from very bad ( 0 ) to very good ( 100 ), an activity question ( “ What are you doing right now ? ” ) answered by endorsing one or more of 22 activities adapted from the day reconstruction method ( 10, 11 ), and a mind-wandering question ( “ Are you thinking about something other than what you ’ re currently doing ? ” ) answered with one of four options: no ; yes, something pleasant ; yes, something neutral ; or yes, something unpleasant.   Although negative moods are known to cause mind wandering ( 13 ), time-lag analyses strongly suggested that mind wandering in their sample was generally the cause, and not merely the consequence, of unhappiness ( 12 ).   The variance explained by mind wandering was largely independent of the variance explained by the nature of activities, suggesting that the two were independent influences on happiness.  

Q2. What is the meaning of mind wandering?

Many philosophical and religious traditions teach that happiness is to be found by living in the moment, and practitioners are trained to resist mind wandering and “to be here now.”  

Q3. What is the reliable method for investigating real-world emotion in vivo?

Experience sampling is generally considered the “gold standard” for investigating real-time emotion in vivo because it reduces or eliminates many of the potential biases inherent in other survey methodologies (S1).  

Q4. Why did the authors consider these participants to be response errors?

Because these participants had already certified that they were at least 18 years old, and because selecting a birth year required a more complicated response than did certifying their age, the authors considered these to be response errors and included these participants in the data set.  

Q5. What is the reason why people wandered?

Although negative moods are known to cause mind wandering (13), time-lag analyses strongly suggested that mind wandering in their sample was generally the cause, and not merely the consequence, of unhappiness (12).  

Q6. What was the effect of mindwandering on happiness?

OLS regression was used at the sample level to analyze the amount of within-person variance in happiness explained by mindwandering and by activity.  

Q7. What was the effect of mind wandering on happiness?

The nature of people’s activities explained 4.6% of the within-person variance in happiness and 3.2% of the between-person variance in happiness, but mind wandering explained 10.8% of within-person variance in happiness and 17.7% of between-person variance in happiness.  

Q8. What was the effect of mind-wandering on happiness?

The authors stated: “The nature of people’s activities explained 4.6% of the within-person variance inhappiness and 3.2% of the between-person variance in happiness, but mind-wandering explained 10.8% of within-person variance in happiness and 17.7% of between-person variance in happiness.”  

Q9. What was the effect of the nature of people’s activities on the rate of mindwander?

Evidence for this statement includes the facts that (a).001), multilevel logistic regression revealed that the probability of mind-wandering to an unpleasant topic was unrelated to a person’s activity (p > 0.25), and (b) person-level regression revealed that differences in people’s activities explained less than 1% of the between-person variance in the rate of mind-wandering to an unpleasant topic (Adj R2 = 0.0085, p < .05) or a neutral topic (Adj R2 = 0.0088, p < .01), and less than 2% of the between-person variance in the rate of mind-wandering to a pleasant topic (Adj R2 = 0.016, p < .001).  

Q10. What are the main reasons why people are not able to predict consequential outcomes?

Although answers to such questions are good predictors of many consequential outcomes, they are poor indices of people’s momentary emotional experiences because both memory and integration are notoriously susceptible to error (S2, S3).  

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Is a Wandering Mind an Unhappy Mind? The Affective Qualities of Creativity, Volition, and Resistance

• First Online: 08 October 2022

Cite this chapter

• Nicolás González 3 ,
• Camila García-Huidobro 3 &
• Pablo Fossa 3  

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In recent years, research on mind wandering has increased. Much of this scientific evidence has shown the negative effects of mind wandering, such as everyday accidents, depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, concentration, and learning problems in educational processes. Although there is scientific evidence of the positive aspects of mind wandering, this is still scarce in literature. In this chapter, we propose the important role of mind wandering as an affective expression of consciousness, which extends to the processes of creativity, volition, and resistance as inter-functional connections of thought.

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González, N., García-Huidobro, C., Fossa, P. (2022). Is a Wandering Mind an Unhappy Mind? The Affective Qualities of Creativity, Volition, and Resistance. In: Dario, N., Tateo, L. (eds) New Perspectives on Mind-Wandering. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06955-0_13

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