Moshe Bar - Mindwandering

T alking about sex, kink, and ADHD, Catie Osborn, an actor and a Shakespeare aficionado, confesses that before discovering the less conventional sexual practices of kinkiness, her mind would often drift during sexual activities. In an interview for Haaretz , she says that discovering kink and BDSM was a purifying moment for her, helping her connect her mind with her body. When you are blindfolded and your partner slides an ice cube over your body, or drips hot wax on your skin, you stop thinking about the noise from the air conditioner or the squeaking of the bed. You are all immersed in the real thing. Indeed, extreme experiences drag you in by calling for your undivided attention. But once youve learned to give in and let the experience take you, it no longer needs to be reserved for extreme situations anymore. Imagine how your life could feel if eating a blueberry would be just as immersive as kink sex with hot wax on your skin, sucking in your entire mind. Immersion is a gift waiting inside our brain.

We all know how insistently mindwandering can hijack our attention, and as our lives have become so much more frenetic, people are increasingly worried about the quality of their mental experience; not just their ability to focus and get their work done, but their ability to enjoy their lives, to be truly, deeply engaged in them. I learned just how concerned they are when an op-ed I wrote, titled Think Less, Think Better, was published by the New York Times a few years ago. In it I considered how much we overlook, not just about the world, but also about the full potential of our inner life, when our mind is cluttered. As resonant as the piece was, it didnt touch on the important insights I have to share about why our minds wander and how their preoccupations are actually vital to our well-being even though some of our mindwandering is indeed harmful.

So much attention has been paid to ways to unplug from the bustle, and thats absolutely to be commended. Ill share my own positive experiences with doing so in silent meditation retreats. But as a series of discoveries in neuroscience over the past several decades have revealed, the greater challenge is freeing ourselves from the distractions within, which disrupt our attention and intrude on the quality of our experience even when we are in a perfectly quiet place. In fact, they may do so even more in times of quiet.

Research has revealed that our brains are inherently active. A number of brain regions connected in whats dubbed the default mode network (DMN) are always grinding away, engaged in a number of different involuntary activities that neuroscientists collectively call mindwandering: from daydreaming to the incessant self-chatter and from ruminating about the past to worrying about the future. The brain regions most often identified as being part of the DMN include the medial prefrontal The logic of evolution suggests there must be something beneficial about it, and over the course of the past couple of decades, I and my neuroscience compatriots have identified a core set of its important functions.

One line of research has shown that some of the default activity is concerned with developing our sense of self, through all sorts of cogitating and monitoring. Another line of research has found that a good amount of the DMNs activity is involved with assessing other people, which is dubbed Theory of Mind (ToM), trying to sort out what others are thinking and what they think of us.

As these findings began coming out, I was initially puzzled about how on earth my own discoveries about the DMNs activity fitted with these other functions. My research then focused on something quite differentvisual cognitionand I found the DMN was highly involved in the process. I was trying to figure out how we piece together clues in the visual environment to construct an understanding of what were seeing. In one such study, I would ask subjects to identify ambiguous objects that I had somewhat obscured in photos. As it turned out, if I showed them, say, a fuzzy image of a hairdryer in the setting of a bathroom, they would identify it as a hairdryer, but if I embedded the same fuzzy hairdryer image in the setting of a workbench, surrounded by a lot of tools, they would identify it as a drill. by making associations between them and the things around them. Why would the same brain network involved in that associative activity also be engaged in developing a sense of self and Theory of Mind skills?