The value of wandering

In yesterday’s column we talked about the current vogue for being always “on” yet how being “off” also has its value. As a companion piece to that theme today we consider the value of being unfocussed and letting your mind wander. The capacity to “focus” is highly valued these days and along with that has come a lessening in regard for the day-dreamer, the muser, the cultivator of whimsy. In days gone by, surely we gave more credit to mind that wandered across splendid Elysian fields rather than just focussing on the mega-bytes before it? Even psychologists decry the wandering mind and say that it equates to lack of happiness and an inability to perform difficult tasks. It is this last point however, that has been challenged in a new study.

The researchers noted that it has been previously thought that in order to solve a mental puzzle you need to recruit the parts of the brain involved in goal-related, externally oriented, focussed thought. At the same time the thought has been that you need to switch off the “default” network of the brain that engages in wandering in order to achieve that focus. This study however, suggests the opposite may be true.

As background the researchers noted that most studies in this area have asked people to perform complex tasks that are novel and which conflict with the functions of the default brain network. Real life however, is rarely like that. In real life the tasks you are confronted with usually bear some relationship the rest of your life and experience and these researchers wondered whether this may make the default network more useful than in the contrived circumstances of previous research.

To test this they had people view a set of famous and non-famous faces in a series and asked them to identify whether a face currently presented to them matched with a face presented two faces previously in the series. At the same time MRI was used to detect which parts of the brain were involved in the task.

The aim was to see whether long-term memory involving famous people, which is run by the brain’s default network, assists in the short-term memory task which is governed by the executive control network of the brain.

The results showed that the subjects were both faster and more accurate when they were matching famous faces than anonymous faces. Since the famous faces trigger greater activity in the non-executive default network of the brain, the part that wanders, it seems that short-term memory and focus can be linked to activity in the default network.

As the researchers expected it appears that in daily life we don’t perform mental tasks in isolation and pursuing goals and focussing also involves unconscious, default brain functions related to past experience, motivation, future plans, and social context. In essence then, the executive control network of your brain and the default network interact to allow a balance between the pursuit of external goals and internal meaning.

Linking your goals and areas of focus into what matters to you at your base level is what makes working towards those goals, and the focus it requires, possible.

Yet again we learn that life is always, and irrevocably, about balance.