Harnessing Our Meandering Minds

When it feels like we’re flailing in briny tides of content  – to use that much-bandied, landscape-flattening term – it’s unsurprising to encounter self-help material to cultivate our eroding capacities for attention. So when I spotted Mindwandering at a local bookstore, I was taken in, at once, by its neuroscientist author’s willingness to go against the cultural grain. To champion the benefits of daydreaming and mind meandering when we’re mostly being urged into shoring up the opposite.

Moshe Bar is not any neuroscientist. He’s directed some of the most prestigious laboratories and research teams, including the Neuroscience Lab at the Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital. In a more recent stint, he led the Brain Research Center at the Bar-Ilan University in Israel. He’s also made a formidable shift from engineering to medicine. After a Master’s in Computer Science, he garnered a doctorate in Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Southern California. All this, as he puts it in his book with a self-deprecating shrug, while contending with his own ADHD. A condition that he’s clearly learned to manage with a deftness that many can take inspiration from.

The Discovery of the DMN (Default Mode Network)

The persistent buzz inside the innards of an organ of which we still know so little – our minds – was discovered by accident.

At the Harvard Medical School, Bar was drawn to the potential of fMRI and its ability to generate colorful neuromaps of the brain in various states. During various experiments, when subjects were shown clouds or happy faces, or asked to think about ice cream or some tragic incident, experimenters stumbled on something else. 

While snapping up images of the subject during their various assignments, they happened to review the images of the subjects’ brains during their resting periods – between assigned tasks. They had assumed that the brain would be less active during such periods. Instead, they discovered the opposite. The brains, at rest, were more active than ever. That led to the discovery of the default mode network (DMN). The question was this: “[why] would our brains waste so much metabolic energy when they were presumably doing nothing?

Bar himself was intrigued enough by this automatic wandering to study it further. After all, he was convinced that there must be evolutionary advantages to mind wandering, or why would the trait have persisted over centuries?

What Do We Usually Day Dream About?

Such self-talk, which usually yanks us away from other productive tasks, occupies as much as 30 to 47 percent of our waking hours.

If we’re spending so much time on mind wandering, the next question is what we’re actually expending so much unintentional energy on. Studies show that these mind trips are centered around two core activities. The first involves cementing our own narratives, to fortify our sense of self. The second is related. It revolves around thinking about what others might be thinking, usually about oneself.

But the brain also works by detecting patterns and making predictions. So context matters. For instance, since Bar also studies visual cognition, he found that people who were shown a fuzzy picture of a hair dryer in a bathroom had no problem identifying it as a hair dryer. When they were shown that same picture on a workbench along with other tools, they thought it was a drill. “Associations are the building blocks of most mental operations.”

Similarly, with the self, the brain is busy guessing how the self will behave in the future, based on how it has performed in the past. And on forecasting the response of others, based on how they have responded in earlier situations. Since we’re spending so much energy on this, we’re disconnected from the present, and we’re likely to miss “novelty” in familiar situations.

Listening To Our Inner Critics

Of course, each person’s inner monologue is singular.  “All words are thoughts, but not all thoughts are words.” When thoughts ping or appear in our consciousness, they become a form of inner speech. Sometimes, they are feelings that we cannot completely explain.

Besides our inner monologue, we also have inner dialogues running, between I and me. The I is the critic, the self-conscious self, while the me wants to indulge itself in immersive experiences. Bar frames it as a conversation between a teenager and a parent.

Our Minds Work by Free Association

Bar dispels another myth. Thoughts do not strike us at random.

Usually, there are triggers – conscious or unconscious. Like you might see someone who wears specs like your mother and you might then think about how you miss her. Or suddenly, you hear a cry on the road, and you’re momentarily scared. Later, that cry might awaken other memories, triggering new thoughts. This chain of thoughts may not follow any logical sequence.  

Even without external distractions, your mind will take pathways that you cannot predict. Let’s say you’re thinking about an upcoming exam. You might think about the prep that you still have to do. You remember past exams, and either feel anxious or excited. You then think of new job opportunities after the exam. Or of how you will celebrate with friends. Thinking of friends, you recall that it’s a close friend’s birthday. Your thoughts keep zigzagging like this. Some of this might be “primed” by unconscious influences – for instance, if you had just seen ads about coaching centers, you might wonder if you need to hire a coach to help you learn better. Our minds then really work by free association.

As Bar puts it: “Free association has been a major therapeutic tool since Freud and Jung and has proven potent in its capacity to unveil thoughts that are hidden from the individual’s conscious access.”

Learning Mindfulness to Observe Thoughts

Bar had his first experience with mindfulness on a basketball court, in a session conducted by the meditation teacher, Jon Kabat-Zinn. The court held a crowd of people, who were asked to kickstart the session by closing their eyes for one minute, staying silent, and looking into themselves.

The author, who was a young professor at Harvard then, and also the father of kids, realized how he had a completely life-altering experience in that minute. Till then, he hadn’t ever paid attention to his inner being. Since then, he has participated in more extensive mindfulness programs, and can at will, immerse himself in his thoughts, or step aside to observe them: “There are two possible perspectives: either you are inside your thoughts and experiencing them like a person sitting on a roller coaster, or you are observing them like someone who has not bought a ticket and is looking at the roller coaster from the ground.”

One of the goals of meditation is to let go of “agency” – so that we don’t have to feel that we are in control of everything.

Types of Thoughts

A mindfulness practice that Bar employs involves labeling thoughts, before dismissing them. For instance, if you think of a troublesome task next week, you can label it negative, future, self. If you think of a quote from a book, you can label it positive, past, self. If you think of how a friend might deal with her divorce, you can label it negative, future, others. And so on, till each thought is dismissed as something vaporous. When Bar did this with his thoughts, he could hear the “swoosh sound of an email being sent off.”

Acknowledging thoughts in meditation is also akin to sharing them with someone else. One can feel the same relief, “with no need for an outside listener.

It can help to understand the types of thoughts we typically encounter:

Associative: School makes you think of friends, which makes you think of parties, which makes you think of cake and champagne, which makes you think of workouts, and so on. People with ADHD tend to be better at associative thinking, and hence also more creative. 

Ruminative: This usually revolves around the same topic in circles. You could be ruminating about some event in the past, where you tripped up on something, and missed out on an opportunity. Or you could be ruminating about some upcoming event, about how you are not prepared, how the audience is likely to be harsh, and how you will hence fail.

Obsessive: While typically associated with conditions like OCD, many others have obsessive thoughts, usually with something negative: like a financial problem or the doings of a person you happen to be interested in (like a romantic interest who might be having a fling). Unlike ruminative thoughts, with obsessive ones, you might feel like you have no choice when they occur.

Intrusive Thoughts: This is a thought, that appears out of the blue, while you might doing something else. It can center around an ongoing worry, or it can involve a pleasant memory. Because it’s intruding, it distracts from a task or activity.

Using Mind Wandering To Solve Problems

In general, when our minds are meandering in a broad “exploratory” manner, it can lift us. This is different from the “exploitatory” state, which is typically more dispiriting. Exploratory mind wandering can help with creative tasks: “The exploratory is outward focused, bottom-up, and experiential, while the exploitatory is inward oriented, top-down and procedural.”

In everyday life, we need both modes. The exploratory state would be ideal on holidays, when you’re conversing with a stranger, when you wish to be open to surprises, and make the most of each moment. The exploitatory state is useful when you need to hunker down and write a report. When seeking new ideas, the exploratory state is better.

Bar can consciously switch between exploratory and exploitatory states, based on the situation and task he’s working on. He can control his brain in this manner because of mindfulness meditation (which would be more exploitatory and top-down, and hence not necessarily a pleasant experience while it is going on).

We are all located somewhere on the exploratory-exploitatory continuum – sometimes, we’re more exploratory and at other times, the latter.

In general, when we’re thinking broader thoughts, we feel better about ourselves. Of course, like the famous chicken-and-egg, this works the other way too. When we’re happier, we’re likely to think in big-picture terms and make creative leaps.

Immersion is Important To Enjoy Life

Just as we know we’re in the world at all times, we also have to remember that “the world is in you.” We experience the world not just as outsiders, but also as insiders. “Experience happens in your brain.”

Bar observes that it is the particular “je ne sais quoi” of your experience that makes it singularly yours. But the more brain resources you have available, you more richly you will take in unfolding experiences.   

Unlike mindfulness, immersion forces us to be present in a different way: to completely relish the moment as a participant, not as an observer. We lose sense of time when completely absorbed by something: which could be a video game, a show, or a walk in the park.

When Bar himself went to a Harry Styles concert with his teenage daughter, he was struck by how genuinely happy some members of that young audience were, while waiting for their idol to appear on stage. He realizes that adults often lose some of that naivete and excitement as they age.     

References

Moshe Bar, Mindwandering: How it can improve your mood and boost your creativity, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023