When Letting Your Mind Wander Helps You Learn
During a simple task that requires minimal attention, mind wandering may actually help people learn probabilistic patterns that let them perform the task better.
'The idea to study the potentially beneficial influence of mind wandering on information processing occurred to us during the COVID pandemic, when we had plenty of time to mind wander,' says Péter Simor, lead author of the recent study and a psychology researcher at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. Study participants practiced a simple task in which they pressed keyboard buttons corresponding to the direction of arrows that lit up on a screen. But there were patterns hidden within the task that the participants were unaware of—and they learned these patterns without consciously noticing them. The researchers found that when participants reported letting their minds wander, they adapted to the task's hidden patterns significantly faster.
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'This is an exciting and important piece of work, especially because the authors opted for a nondemanding task to check how [mind wandering] would affect performance and learning,' says Athena Demertzi, a cognitive and clinical neuroscientist at the University of Liège in Belgium. Previous related research focused more on long and demanding tasks, she says—on which zoning out is typically shown to have a negative effect.
But the results are not clear-cut, says Jonathan Smallwood, a psychology researcher at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. 'I don't think that this means the spontaneous mind-wandering episodes themselves cause implicit learning to occur,' he says. 'Rather both emerge at the same time when people go into a particular state.' Neither Smallwood nor Demertzi was involved in the new study.
Simor, who studies sleep, was interested in whether participants' mind wandering displayed any neural hallmarks of dozing off. Using electroencephalogram recordings, the team showed that in those test periods, participants' brains produced more of the slow waves that are dominant during sleep. Perhaps, the researchers say, mind wandering is like a form of light sleep that provides some of that state's learning benefits. To better understand whether mind wandering might compensate for lost sleep, Simor and his colleagues next plan to study narcolepsy and sleep deprivation.
'We know that people spend significant amounts of time not focused on what they are doing,' Smallwood says. 'The authors' work is important because it helps us understand how reasonably complex forms of behavior can continue when people are focused on other things—and that even though our thoughts were elsewhere, the external behavior can still leave its mark on the person.'
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I Nearly Died From 'Broken Heart Syndrome' — And Here's Why You Could Be At Risk, Too
'I hope you're taking care of yourself.' That's the line that's been coming at me for years now –– across my texts, LinkedIn DMs and voicemails, across dinner tables and Slack messages, and haven't-seen-you-in-forever emails. I know people mean well. I can feel their complicated mix of sympathy, pity and thank-God-it's-not-me relief. But the words roll off tongues with an ease and frequency usually reserved for basic, mindless tasks –– not the truly daunting business of righting yourself after being pummeled by one (or more) of adult life's most stressful experiences. According to The Holmes-Rahe Stress Inventory, I've been through a whole host of those experiences –– some of them a few times over. My father and maternal grandmother both died of cancer the same year, I've moved more than a dozen times since graduating from college, and I've lost three jobs. In the past year alone, I've gotten laid off; had my 3-year-old son diagnosed with a rare, difficult-to-control epilepsy; and tested positive for COVID on my birthday. My friends have dubbed me 'a warrior,' 'a real-life superhero,' and 'the queen of coping.' And while I don't know if those are fully-earned monikers in a country where almost 38 million people are living below the poverty line, I've admittedly asked myself: Is this a normal amount of stuff to deal with? But at the end of the day, I know I'm not special. At the very least, we're all being subjected to the truly head-banging soundtrack of everything that's going wrong in this world, including deep-rooted racism, misogyny, gun violence, natural disasters, political turmoil, the aftershocks of a global pandemic, and more. And these chronic stressors –– in addition to isolated events –– are heavy contributors to any given person's cumulative stress level. But we keep on keeping on, right? After being repeatedly Whack-a-Mole-d by a few of life's most stressful events, I continued making plans where I could. I started my own business, and I scheduled an elective plastic surgery I'd been considering for a long time. I was excited about the expected results after staring at a postpartum body I barely recognized for three-plus years. So, on Jan. 17, 2023, at 5:30 a.m., I arrived at the hospital for my surgery. The night before, I half-jokingly said to my mom and my husband, Pearse: 'If anything happens to me, I love you!' 'You'll be fine!' They both replied in rapid succession. 'I know, I know,' I said. 'I'm just saying it.' They put me in bay number 13 for the surgery prep. I wondered aloud to Pearse over the phone if that was bad luck. We quickly chuckled about it and then it was time for me to go to the induction room. The anesthesia team gave me some medication to calm my nerves, wheeled me into the operating room, and put me to sleep. About 10 minutes later, everything went sideways. My medical team couldn't get a pulse on me –– femoral, radial, carotid –– nothing. They started CPR. After a few minutes, they were able to resuscitate me, and I was emergently transferred to the cardiac catheterization lab. When I regained consciousness later that day, I tried to take stock of my surroundings and my body. I was still out of it from the anesthesia, but I knew this wasn't the way I had expected to wake up –– with a breathing tube down my throat and a still-undetermined amount of lines coming out of my neck, arms and hands. I eventually learned I was in the cardiac intensive care unit, where I stayed for the rest of the week recovering from being brought back to life, undergoing invasive cardiac testing, and hosting a revolving door of medical professionals. 'Are you under any significant stress?' One of the cardiologists asked me during rounds the next morning. I stared at him blankly. 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I thought about my dad –– a former pediatric anesthesiologist –– and how I wished he was there to tell me everything's going to be OK. I thought about how grief has a cruel way of forever siphoning off just a little bit of the joy that comes with every celebration-worthy event, every achievement. And I thought about how ironic it was that I'd coded on the operating table after getting anesthesia –– my dad's exact work. Ultimately, my heart function eventually returned to normal and my medical team ruled out every cardiac condition except one: stress cardiomyopathy, also known as 'broken heart syndrome.' It's a complex condition in which the heart muscle is quickly, but temporarily, weakened, often as a result of intense emotional or physical stress. According to my cardiologist, Dr. Anna C. O'Kelly, a fellow in cardiovascular medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, my case, like many stress cardiomyopathy cases, isn't clear cut –– and was likely multifactorial. 'It is hard to know which came first,' said Dr. O'Kelly. 'Did you develop stress cardiomyopathy from all the many life stressors you have... which placed you 'at risk' for the cardiac arrest? Or did your body interact poorly with the anesthesia leading to your cardiac arrest, which then caused a stress cardiomyopathy?' The role stress played in my situation is a mystery I'm still very much grappling with. And a frustrating mystery at that, because while I probably had above-average stress in my life, I wasn't just letting it go unchecked. I've been seeing a therapist regularly since my dad died, I've test driven many stress management techniques over the years, and I'm hyper-aware of what I'm doing (or not doing) on a daily basis to fortify my mental health and well-being. I now take an hour-long walk every day, I just finished a 12-week cardiac rehabilitation program, I joined a gym, I'm on a beta-blocker, and I've finally let myself spend a few nights away from home to sleep without staring at the baby monitor all night. But fitting all that in on top of day-to-day life –– figuring out how to 'take care of yourself' today –– sure feels like a bonafide burden. Like that to-do list item you can never cross off. An extra responsibility that comes at you day after day with the cliché laundry list of yoga and just-10-minutes-of-meditation and daily exercise and weekly therapy and time with family and time with friends and time to yourself and time for the hobbies that help you feel like a person. And if I –– an upper-middle class, straight, white homeowner, with a master's degree, community support, a stable of resources, and an incredible amount of privilege –– can't take care of myself in America today enough to avoid stress-induced heart failure, then how can anyone? So, where do I go from here? Where do any of us go from here? After all, when it comes to stress, I'm certainly not alone. According to the American Psychological Association, 27% of Americans report they are so stressed they can't function. 'That's huge,' Dr. Lynn Bufka, associate chief for practice transformation at the American Psychological Association, and a licensed psychologist in the state of Maryland, told me. Dr. Bufka also says this type of collective, debilitating stress produces a ripple effect that seeps into just about every crevice of society. 'It's not about one person being so stressed they can't function,' she said. 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This story was originally published in September 2023 and is being rerun now as part of HuffPost Personal's 'Best Of' series. Melisse Lombard is a writer, editor, content professional and former journalist, now running her own editorial content production company. She lives outside Boston with her husband, Pearse, their son, and their pup. Melisse is also a co-founder of and singer in award-winning professional a cappella group, Sound Off. Do you have a compelling personal story you'd like to see published on HuffPost? Find out what we're looking for here and send us a pitch. Related... I'm A Doctor Who Almost Died Because My Own Doctors Refused To Do This 1 Basic Thing My Doctor Offered Me A 'Modern Medical Miracle.' Then A Side Effect Changed My Life Forever. If I'd Listened To My Doctor, I Would Be Dead Right Now
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