What a Wandering Mind Learns

Scientific American

10-06-2025

While you do the dishes or drive to work, your mind is likely not on the task at hand; perhaps you're composing a grocery list or daydreaming about retiring in Italy. But research published in the Journal of Neuroscience suggests you might be taking in more than you think.
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.'