Our minds are wandering half the time, a sort of mental workspace that allows us to juggle multiple thoughts.
Psychology researchers Daniel Levinson and Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Jonathan Smallwood at the Max Planck Institute, Germany, reports that a person’s working memory capacity is tied to mind wandering during a routine assignment.
They asked volunteers to perform one of two simple tasks – either pressing a button in response to the appearance of a certain letter on a screen, or simply tapping in time with one’s breath – and compared people’s propensity to drift off, the journal Psychological Science reports.
“We intentionally use tasks that will never use all of their attention and then we ask, how do people use their idle resources?” Smallwood explained, according to Wisconsin statement.
The result is the first positive correlation found between working memory and mind wandering and suggests that working memory may actually enable off-topic thoughts.
“What this study seems to suggest is that when circumstances for the task aren’t very difficult, people who have additional working memory resources deploy them to think about things other than what they’re doing,” Smallwood said.
—Agencies