‘Our minds wander for 50 per cent of waking hours’

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Even as we sit down to write the first words of this article, a fluttering pigeon somewhere outside the window makes us go back to when we went out for a walk to Marine Drive three months ago. We begin missing the sunset, the crashing waves, and the chaos of the crowd on the promenade. We return to writing this piece again.

Cognitive neuroscientist Moshe Bar, director of the Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center at Bar-Ilan University, Tel Aviv, doesn't see this drifting of thoughts as a concern. "Everybody thinks that mind wanderers are freaks of nature. But, it turns out that all of us wander for about 50 per cent of our waking hours, which I think is stunning," he tells us over a video call from Tel Aviv. His just released book, Mindwandering: How it Can Improve Your Mood and Boost Your Creativity (Bloomsbury), is a pioneering attempt to destigmatise the act of wandering in thought.

While not all mind wandering is productive, Moshe Bar says that we need to stop feeling guilty about it. Instead, we should be more aware of our thoughts

Beyond his own interest in the subject, significant developments in cognitive neuroscience research compelled him to study wanderers. "One of them was the discovery of what we call the default mode network (DMN). It turns out that the moment people are not busy with a specific demanding task, a good chunk of their brain is actually vigorously active... and there is this giant network [DMN] that consumes a lot of their time, energy and metabolic activity. There is a white paper in science, which shows the overlap - your mind wandering and the [neural] activation as seen by the functional MRI machines. We realised that the DMN is the seat of mind wandering. This made scientists [like me] curious about what [the] function of mind wandering [was], and why we spend so much energy in something that's considered aimless."

Edited excerpts from the interview

There is a tendency to mistake mind wandering for daydreaming? How are they different?
Day dreaming overlaps with mind wandering, but the latter is seen as a host, or rather, a cluster of operations and processes that include everything from planning, mental stimulations of upcoming events, reminiscing about the past, to sometimes taking things from the past and projecting them into the future. Not all mind wandering is productive; some of it is actually hurtful for us, like ruminative thinking [a persistent cyclical thinking pattern that surround the same topic. A ruminative mind would dwell on the same incident or episode, examine it from multiple angles, repeatedly, irrationally, while typically agonising over it]. We need to be more aware of the wandering mind, and not feel guilty about it. It's a good idea to learn about its benefits, so that we don't stop it when it is appropriate for us
to continue.

One of the aims of the book is to also explain why mind wandering is not so bad after all? How can it be a constructive activity?
Wandering helps you travel - we call it mental time travel [the content of your thought consists of the present or what's in front of you, the past or some random reminiscing or a memory that is or not related in some way to your present, and the future or planning, weighing consequences, or simply worrying]. It can take you to a past, project it into the future, and help you better prepare. We are organisms who at the end of the day need certainty.

Because mind wandering relies heavily on what we have stored in memory, young children wander to a lesser extent. Is that a good thing?
The vast majority of the brain finishes developing by the time you are five or six years old. But, [our proclivity for] mind wandering leans heavily on the prefrontal cortex [resides in the front of the brain]. It is the latest to mature, usually around your mid-20s. In order to develop this area, which helps you understand new situations based on old situations, and all possible outcomes, you have to acquire more experiences. Until then, your ability to understand consequences of your actions and risks are compromised. This is really a chicken and egg situation. A six-year-old wouldn't be able to envision what it would mean to give a talk in a large auditorium, because s/he has never been in such an environment before. They don't have the database to generate these projections.

You write about what occupies the mind and DMN when we wander - first is the self, and next is trying to figure out others and what they think of us. How can clarity about the self and what others think about us, help address crucial feelings?
Yes, there's one part of us that thinks about the self, and this entity of "who is me?" - we're constantly updating it. And then there is the Theory of Mind [sometimes called also mentalising] where we use this same default network to understand others, their emotions, and beliefs. Trying to infer what is in the minds of others is critical for our interactions, and also for survival. But, sometimes we are delusional - almost arrogant - in believing in our ability to understand the intentions of others. It's [already] hard for us to know what's going on in our own mind. If we cannot understand ourselves, how are we going to understand others? The best we can do is be aware of this discrepancy. Tao Te Ching [ancient Chinese text that discusses how to live with integrity and honesty] by Lao Tzu says, "Knowing others is wisdom. Knowing the self is enlightenment."

Can we really control how much we wander?
We cannot just tell ourselves, "let's start wandering now". It's a spontaneous process, and it's not impervious to our conscious interventions. It is good to recognise when you are in a state of positive, creative wandering. You have to give it room. You can summon it, but not really control it.

Throughout the book, you hark back to meditation, a tool that you say helps us understand our mind better.
I am a novice in the practice. But, I think it's a really cool tool. As a neuroscientist, I cannot study the mind, without looking inward. I think meditation makes you think about what you are thinking. It's intimate, and rich. It's a powerful tool to allow yourself to observe your thoughts. This doesn't mean that you can control your mind, but you can be aware of the content and the breath of your thought, and sometimes are able to label them either as [one-time] visitors [or something that keeps recurring].