Nonurgency

“Have you ever sat in an airplane or train, just staring out the window with nothing to read, looking at nothing in particular? You might have found that the time passed very pleasantly, with no real memory of what exactly you were looking at, what you were thinking, or for that matter, how much time actually elapsed. You might have had a similar feeling the last time you sat by the ocean or a lake, letting your mind wander, and experiencing the relaxing feeling it induced. In this state, thoughts seem to move seamlessly from one to another, there’s a merging of ideas, visual images, and sounds, of past, present, and future. Thoughts turn inward—loosely connected, stream-of-consciousness thoughts so much like the nighttime dream state that we call them daydreams.”

“This distinctive and special brain state is marked by the flow of connections among disparate ideas and thoughts, and a relative lack of barriers between senses and concepts. It also can lead to great creativity and solutions to problems that seemed unsolvable. Its discovery—a special brain network that supports a more fluid and nonlinear mode of thinking—was one of the biggest neuroscientific discoveries of the last twenty years. This network exerts a pull on consciousness; it eagerly shifts the brain into mind-wandering when you’re not engaged in a task, and it hijacks your consciousness if the task you’re doing gets boring. It has taken over when you find you’ve been reading several pages in a book without registering their content, or when you are driving on a long stretch of highway and suddenly realize you haven’t been paying attention to where you are and you missed your exit.”

[...]

“The discovery of this mind-wandering mode didn’t receive big headlines in the popular press, but it has changed the way neuroscientists think about attention. Daydreaming and mind-wandering, we now know, are a natural state of the brain. This accounts for why we feel so refreshed after it, and why vacations and naps can be so restorative. The tendency for this system to take over is so powerful that its discoverer, Marcus Raichle, named it the default mode. This mode is a resting brain state, when your brain is not engaged in a purposeful task, when you’re sitting on a sandy beach or relaxing in your easy chair with a single malt Scotch, and your mind wanders fluidly from topic to topic. It’s not just that you can’t hold on to any one thought from the rolling stream, it’s that no single thought is demanding a response.

The mind-wandering mode stands in stark contrast to the state you’re in when you’re intensely focused on a task such as doing your taxes, writing a report, or navigating through an unfamiliar city. This stay-on-task mode is the other dominant mode of attention, and it is responsible for so many high-level things we do that researchers have named it “the central executive.” These two brain states form a kind of yin-yang: When one is active, the other is not. During demanding tasks, the central executive kicks in. The more the mind-wandering network is suppressed, the greater the accuracy of performance on the task at hand.”

Excerpt From

The Organized Mind

Daniel J. Levitin

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-organized-mind/id731072740?mt=11

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