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Sensing the self in the wandering mind
Published in Lesa Scholl, Medicine, Health and Being Human, 2018
Today, mental activity known variously as daydream, fantasy, self-generated thought and mind wandering, are recognised to occur within regions of the brain that increase in activation during periods of rest (Callard and Margulies 2011). These investigations are bound to the identification of a “default mode network” (DMN) of the brain, identified as such because within experimental fMRI scans, participants, when not engaged in cognitively demanding tasks and asked simply to rest in the scanner, consistently display heightened rates of metabolic activity in specific regions of the brain (Fox et al. 2013, 2). Mind wandering is understood to occur when the DMN is active, and it is here, tangibly situated within these networks of the brain, that conceptualisations of the self are again being revised.
Postures
Published in Anne George, Oluwatobi Samuel Oluwafemi, Blessy Joseph, Sabu Thomas, Sebastian Mathew, V. Raji, Holistic Healthcare, 2017
Before I discuss sleeping positions, it is important to note that the quality of sleep is also very important. One needs a good sleep for 6–8 hours in order to charge ones bodies, to be ready for work the next day. I will discuss here one part of the equation, which will help patients who toss and turn between 1 and 3 hours or more before they fall sleep. When one cannot fall asleep within 30 min, then their brain is active and they start thinking about the day’s work and worrying about the next day. The aim is stop one’s mind wandering by a simple technique. If a person starts counting into the multiplication of 3, that is, 3, 6, 9, 12, 15…, or 1000, 999, 998, 997, 996… they will not be thinking about his work or any other thing. Their mind will be concentrating on this exercise and they will fall into sleep in a very short span of time. My experience is that this exercise helps at least 80% of patients.
Situation awareness
Published in Rhona Flin, George G. Youngson, Steven Yule, Enhancing Surgical Performance, 2015
Rhona Flin, Simon Paterson-Brown
We normally engage in some degree of selfmonitoring of our current state of awareness or at least notice when we have stopped gathering information relevant to the task in hand. If you have been reading this book and suddenly realized that you have not taken in any of the last three paragraphs, this reveals not only mind wandering but also activation of this monitoring function. Mind wandering or ‘zoning out’24 is when one mentally drifts away from the task in hand ‘towards unrelated inner thoughts, fantasies, feelings and other musings’.24 This ‘daydreaming’ is a very common experience. It is a form of distraction, but attention shifts to inner thoughts rather than to a different external stimulus. To date, mind wandering has been mainly studied in the laboratory; but for jobs that can involve periods of vigilant monitoring, such as that of anaesthetists, there are clear safety implications. Although zoning out is unlikely to occur for the operating surgeon, surgical assistants may fall into such a state, particularly in long and tedious (for them) operations.
Straying Off Course: The Negative Impact of Mind Wandering on Fine Motor Movements
Published in Journal of Motor Behavior, 2022
Mariana Rachel Dias da Silva, Marie Postma
In sum, mind wandering is generally more likely to take place under low demand tasks and less likely as task demands increase (Smallwood & Schooler, 2006). Moreover, mind wandering is also likely to increase during monotonous activities, either because of low attentional demands required or because of cognitive depletion resulting from effortful processing required for continuous performance. With time on task increasing, participants become habituated to these tasks, and mind wandering becomes more likely as a result of low levels of arousal. In tasks assessing continuous movements, mind wandering seems to be related to poorer tracking accuracy and more complex reaching, indicative of changes in arousal. Greater intermittent and less variable motor movements, previously found to be related to an internal focus of attention, could also potentially be indicative of mind wandering.
Is sustained attention deficit related to subclinical obsessive thoughts in children and adolescents with ADHD?
Published in International Journal of Psychiatry in Clinical Practice, 2020
Hugues Lamothe, Eric Acquaviva, Jean–Marc Baleyte, Richard Delorme
The thought content during attention lapses in patients with ADHD has been recently studied (Seli et al. 2015; Van den Driessche et al. 2017), and an increased proportion of mind wandering has been reported in these patients (Seli et al. 2015). Following Christoff’s classic definition, mind wandering is characterised by thoughts that are free to ‘move hither and thither’ and is hypothesised to be linked to sustained attention lapses (Christoff et al. 2016). Indeed, the resource control theory, which was developed to specifically account for sustained attention, showed that sustained attention performance allocated to a cognitive task declines with time, as attention moves towards more internal thoughts, possibly explaining attention lapses (Thomson et al. 2015; Fortenbaugh et al. 2017). Besides, specifically in ADHD, attention lapses could result in attentional processes being more devoted to internal thoughts rather than specific goal-directed tasks (Fortenbaugh et al. 2017), thus, explaining the increase in mind wandering reported in ADHD.
The effects of text length on reading abilities in accelerated reading tasks
Published in Speech, Language and Hearing, 2019
Matthew D. Carter, Marianna M. Walker, Kevin O’Brien, Monica S. Hough
Finally, attention offers a plausible explanation for this interaction between text length and acceleration condition. Mind wandering occurs when attention is shifted away from the desired stimuli and instead focused upon unrelated thoughts. High levels of mind wandering are associated with low levels of comprehension (McVay & Kane, 2012). The current results could be explained by improvements in controlling attention, thus decreasing mind wandering episodes. Breznitz (1987) stated that slow reading gives more opportunities for distracting stimuli to manifest during the longer periods of empty time between linguistic units. In normal reading situations, longer passages provide more opportunities for distracting features to manifest themselves if for no other reason than longer passages take longer to read. During normal reading activities, readers can easily glance up from the page in order to do whatever they desire, being assured that the same words will be in the same place as they were if they decide to return their gaze toward the page. During this time the information that is being processed in the short term and working memory buffers decays. In contrast, accelerated reading tasks do not afford the reader the opportunity to pick up right up where they left off. Once the words have scrolled across the screen, they will not return. Utilizing accelerated reading magnifies the dire consequences of mindless reading during a reading task. Reducing the likelihood of distraction during longer passages could explain why longer passages were comprehended with high levels when presented in an accelerated fashion.