The era of the wandering mind? Twenty-first century research on self-generated mental activity

Abstract

The first decade of the twenty-first century was characterized by renewed scientific interest in self-generated mental activity (activity largely generated by the individual, rather than in direct response to experimenters’ instructions or specific external sensory inputs). To understand this renewal of interest, we interrogated the peer-reviewed literature from 2003 to 2012 (i) to explore recent changes in use of terms for self-generated mental activity; (ii) to investigate changes in the topics on which mind wandering research, specifically, focuses; and (iii) to visualize co-citation communities amongst researchers working on self-generated mental activity. Our analyses demonstrated that there has been a dramatic increase in the term “mind wandering” from 2006, and a significant crossing-over of psychological investigations of mind wandering into cognitive neuroscience (particularly in relation to research on the default mode and default mode network). If our article concludes that this might, indeed, be the “era of the wandering mind,” it also calls for more explicit reflection to be given by researchers in this field to the terms they use, the topics and brain regions they focus on, and the research literatures that they implicitly foreground or ignore.

Love is the triumph of the imagination: Daydreams about significant others are associated with increased happiness, love and connection

“…Our findings indicate that love can really be a triumph of the imagination, albeit not in the sense originally intended in the popular quotation. 3 Although research on daydreaming has experienced a resurgence in recent years (Callard, Smallwood, Golchert, & Margulies, 2013) the field would benefit from examining social aspects of daydreaming to uncover the ways in which people's imaginary, as well as actual, worlds contribute to their socio-emotional functioning.…”

Mind-wandering is unguided attention: accounting for the “purposeful” wanderer

“…Mind-wandering research is also one of the fastest-growing areas of cognitive science (e.g. Smallwood and Schooler 2006;Callard et al 2013) and scientists have stressed that the field requires firmer philosophical foundations (e.g. Christoff 2012;Callard et al 2013;Smallwood 2013).…”

Are you mind-wandering, or is your mind on task? The effect of probe framing on mind-wandering reports

“…Research on mind-wandering has exploded in the past decade: comparing 1996-2005 with 2006-2015, according to Google Scholar there were, respectively, 4 and 377 articles with the term "mind-wandering" in the title in each 10-year period (see also Callard, Smallwood, Golchert, & Margulies, 2013). Along with this exponential growth in output, a methodological fragmentation has occurred: there is no consensus as to how mindwandering is measured.…”