You’re sitting at your desk, writing a short story. You remain focused but after several hours, you still can’t see how to end it. So you go for a run, allowing your thoughts to run with you. Instead of stumbling on a rock, you fall onto a solution.
Sometimes, problems do not have obvious answers. The “eureka” solution comes when we are not expecting it, when our mind wanders. But what causes our mind to wander? What about running lets us come up with an answer that sitting at our desk does not?
While we often think of mind wandering as detrimental, it can spark creativity. By better understanding the situations in which mind wandering emerges, we can better design our work and play not just to solve problems, but also to enjoy where our mind takes us.
My recent study, published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition, aims to explore what aspects of a task result in mind wandering.
A U-shaped curve
It has long been thought that mind wandering follows a U-shaped curve in relation to task difficulty.
Let’s go back to the example of writing a short story to understand this. Though “optimally” difficult for you, making you stay on task, for me, it is too difficult. I switch off and my mind wanders more.
However, reading a book to my three-year-old for the 50th time is too easy. Again my mind wanders.
That is the U-shaped curve: if things are too easy or too hard, people’s minds wander.
But research that assesses whether mind wandering is caused by the level of difficulty of a task often compares dissimilar tasks – say, searching for Wally compared to counting backwards in sevens.
Several cognitive processes may be involved, which makes distinguishing the drivers of mind wandering more difficult.
Tapping into the brain’s control system
In our experiment, we asked 80 participants to perform one of three highly controlled and uniform tasks – all of which tapped into the brain’s inhibitory control system. This system is responsible for the brain’s ability to stop an action or suppress a response.
In the first task, people either always reacted to a “go” signal, or had to stop themselves reacting. This is known as a “go/no-go” task, in which participants must sometimes withhold their automatic response.
In the second task, participants had to respond to one of two letters, or one of six letters. This is known as a “forced choice” task. Here, people are thought to ready all responses, and stop themselves pushing the wrong response button.
In the third task, participants had to select the highest of two numbers, while ignoring that sometimes the higher-value number was written in a smaller font. This is known as a “numerical Stroop task”, in which people have to inhibit, or ignore, incongruent information (the font size) in favour of the value of the number. If the number values are closer together, this task is harder.
During each of these tasks, we occasionally asked participants whether their mind was wandering, along with monitoring their reaction times and their accuracy.
In the first two tasks, people’s minds wandered more when they didn’t have to actively stop a response, and when they had only two possible responses to make. Similarly, responses were quicker in these easier tasks, and more accurate.
The results from the third task were more surprising.
When the task was more difficult – when the number values were closer together – people’s reactions were slower and less accurate. But the level of difficulty had no effect on mind wandering: people’s minds still wandered, roughly the same amount as in the easier tasks.
The trick of staying on task
These findings show that when we engage our inhibitory control system, we pay more attention and take our time in responding. In other words, if we don’t have to control our attention, we might not.
So if you want to stay on task, try an activity that involves stopping yourself sometimes, or making decisions where the easy choice may not be the right one. If you want your mind to wander, try a steadier and more consistent activity.
To take a couple of sport examples: if you’re playing tennis you need to react and make choices all the time, so you’re more likely to stay focused. But if you go for a run, you’re probably just putting one foot in front of the other without taxing your inhibitory control system, so your mind is free to roam.
In a work context, if you want to focus, perhaps using your inhibitory control system (just the right amount, say by working from a coffee shop that has some distractions we need to actively ignore) might help.
Of course, this might not be the case for everyone – especially when neurodivergence and habit come into play. It’s important to test different strategies to see what works for you.
And remember that not every problem will be worked through by sitting at your desk. Sometimes, you do need to let your mind wander to give yourself the space to solve problems creatively.
