A Mind Free to Wander: Neural and Computational Constraints on Spontaneous Thought

摘要

One prominent feature of human conscious experience is mind-wandering, the automatic drift ofattention away from an ongoing task toward thoughts often completely unrelated to the task athand (e.g., thinking about running while reading a manuscript; Antrobus et al., 1966; Christoffet al., 2016). Humans spend about 25–50% of their daily lives mind-wandering (Killingsworthand Gilbert, 2010), with obvious disadvantages for performance on ongoing tasks (Smallwood andSchooler, 2015). We do not mind-wander so frequently because it is fun. In fact, mind-wanderingmost often causes bad mood, regardless of whether the content of off-task thoughts was negative orpositive (Killingsworth and Gilbert, 2010). Rather, mind-wandering may be adaptive. For example,after an incubation period filled with a trivial task promoting mind-wandering, individualswere better at conceiving unusual uses of common objects, as if mind-wandering favored theunconscious, unconstrained interaction of multiple, distant concepts typical of creative thinking(Baird et al., 2012). This advantage was not observed if during the incubation period participantsrested, possibly because rest increases the tendency to think (consciously) about the terms of theproblem, constraining excessively the content of thought.