Science Article

BELIEVE me, I will try my hardest, but I cannot stop what is going to happen to you in the next 5 minutes. It might be a memory that takes you away... a place that you knew, or an idea you once had. It could be hunger. It could be sex. It could already be happening now.

As you read these sentences, your mind will almost certainly wander at least once - just as mine is drifting as I decide how best to phrase these words so that they hold your attention. In fact, according to some estimates, we may spend nearly 50 per cent of our lives drifting away from the present moment into the world inside our heads.

Sigmund Freud considered such zoning out "infantile"; others feared it could lead to psychosis. Today, we know it is instead the sign of a healthy mind, allowing us to plan for the future by imagining different events, for instance. One particular virtue might even transform how we work, teach children, operate business and nurture ideas.

Drifting, it seems, is a sure sign that our creative juices are flowing. When it comes to arriving at brilliant ideas, the ability to concentrate is overrated. If a person's mind is wandering, they outperform their peers in a range of tasks where flashes of insight are important, from imaginative word games to exercises in original thinking and invention.

The psychologists researching the benefits of daydreaming would never claim to have found a formula for all creative achievement. But their results suggest that learning how to tread the line between focusing in and zoning out could help you to arrive at a breakthrough you might otherwise have missed.

One of the first psychologists to turn their attention to mind wandering was Jonathan Schooler of the University of California in Santa Barbara. One day he was listening to a talk on consciousness when the speaker mentioned the wandering mind. Schooler was so intrigued that he found it tricky to focus. "My mind kept wandering about mind wandering," he says. He found it peculiar that we should enter the state so frequently. "It's the mind escaping from the present," he says, "and we're doing it all the time."

His subsequent experiments helped to show just how often our minds stray off-piste. In one study, volunteers had to read extracts of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace in his lab. Besides asking them to report whenever they noticed themselves drifting, he would also ask them what they were thinking about at random intervals, and at the end, he tested their comprehension of the text. These measures revealed that people's minds wandered from the words for more than 20 per cent of the time, often without them realising. When faced with other tasks, our capacity for distraction seems even greater; a recent study asking people to report their state of mind at random intervals during the day - via a smartphone app - showed that their attention was wandering from the task at hand a whopping 47 per cent of the time (Science, vol 330, p 932).

Flashes of inspiration

For a long time, this kind of mind wandering would have been considered a serious failing. Instead, the ability to filter out distractions and focus on a task - dubbed executive control - was considered to lie behind smart thinking. Since keeping your train of thought on track is necessary to remember information from moment to moment, short-term "working-memory" capacity is often used to gauge executive control. By this measure, a host of studies have shown that people who can focus well tend to ace analytical problems: they are whizzes at arithmetic and verbal reasoning tasks, and often have a higher IQ. If you wanted to be clever, it seemed that you would need to learn how to concentrate.

Yet there were hints that concentration wasn't all it was cracked up to be. While people with a high level of working memory are good at analytical problems, they tend to struggle on tasks that require flashes of inspiration. "Often the best way to solve a problem is to not focus," says Jennifer Wiley at the University of Illinois in Chicago, who recently reviewed the research (Psychology of Learning and Motivation, vol 56, p 185).

Consider the following brain-teaser, which represents one of the types of puzzle used in these studies. What single word can be added to "High, book and sour" to make another word or phrase? To solve it, you can't simply apply an analytical approach since that would involve crunching through every word in your vocabulary, says Wiley. Instead, the answer often comes out of the blue. Various studies show that people with high working-memory capacity, and therefore good executive control, can find it more difficult to solve these problems than people who are more easily distracted. (The answer, by the way, is "note".)