unthinking 2

Frontiers in Psychology, 2013

The waking mind is often occupied with mental contents that are minimally constrained by events in the here and now. These self-generated thoughts-e.g., mind-wandering or daydreaming-interfere with external task performance and can be a marker for unhappiness and even psychiatric problems. They also occupy our thoughts for upwards of half of the time, and under non-demanding conditions they (i) allow us to connect our past and future selves together, (ii) help us make successful long-term plans and (iii) can provide a source of creative inspiration. The lengths that the mind goes to self-generate thought, coupled with its apparent functionality, suggest that the mind places a higher priority on such cognition than on many other mental acts. Although mind-wandering may be unpleasant for the individual who experiences it and disruptive to the tasks of the moment, self-generated thought allows consciousness freedom from the here and now and so reflects a key evolutionary adaptation for the mind. Here we synthesize recent literature from cognitive and clinical psychology and propose two formal hypotheses that (1) highlight task context and thought content as critical factors that constrain the costs and benefits of self-generated thought and (2) provide direction on ways to investigate the costs and benefits from an impartial perspective.

Archives of Psychiatric Nursing, 2007

This paper focused on the possibility that intrusive thoughts (ITs) are a form of an evolutionary, adaptive, and complex strategy to prepare for and resolve stressful life eventsthrough schema formation. Intrusivethoughts have been studied in relation to individual conditions, such as traumatic stress disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder.They have also been documented in the average person experiencing everydaystress. In manydescriptionsofthought intrusion, itisaccompanied by thought suppression. Several theories have been put forth to describe ITs, although none provides a satisfactory explanation as to whether ITs are a normal process, a normal process gone astray, or a sign of pathology.There is also no consistentviewoftherolethatthoughtsuppression plays in theprocess. I propose that thought intrusion and thought suppression may be better understood by examiningthemtogether asacomplex and adaptivemechanism capableofescalating in times of need.The ability of a biological mechanism to scale up in times of need is one hallmark of a complex and adaptive system. Other hallmarks of complexity, including self-similarity across scales, sensitivity to initial conditions, presence of feedback loops, and system oscillation, are also discussed in this article. Finally, I proposethat thought intrusion and thought suppression are better described together as an oscillatory cycle.

Cognitive Therapy and Research, 2008

Cognitive theorists describe mindfulness as a form of attention-awareness in which thoughts can be observed in non-judging, de-centered, and non-attached ways. However, empirical research has not examined associations between mindfulness and responses to negative automatic thoughts, such as the ability to let go of negative cognition. In the first study reported in this article, measures of dispositional mindfulness were negatively correlated with negative thought frequency and perceptions of the ability to let go of negative thoughts in an unselected student sample. In the second study reported, these associations were replicated in a treatment-seeking student sample, where participation in a mindfulness meditation-based clinical intervention was shown to be associated with decreases in both frequency and perceptions of difficulty in letting-go of negative automatic thoughts. Theoretical and clinical implications are discussed.

2017

The Psychology of Habit, 2018

Much of our behaviour is determined by habits, as we can readily observe in our daily repeating routines and struggles with the way we eat, sleep, and manage our time. Aside from habitual behaviour, we are also guided by mental habits, habitual patterns in the way we think and feel. When making a mistake, for instance, we may instantaneously jump to negative judgements about ourselves (Verplanken, Friborg, Wang, Trafimow, & Woolf, 2007), or engage in strategies to repair our mood and positive self-image, potentially without even noticing that these mental processes are taking place (Gyurak, Gross, & Etkin, 2011). Such mental habits may be less readily observable, but not necessarily less impactful then habitual behaviour. An important part of our experience that seems to fit the concept of a mental habit is the tenacious tendency for our minds to "wander" away from what we are doing and get drawn towards thoughts unrelated to the here and now. Mind wandering-engaging in stimulus-or task-unrelated thought-occupies roughly half of our waking hours (e.g. Killingsworth & Gilbert, 2010; McVay, Kane, & Kwapil, 2009). Thus, it fits our intuitive idea of habits as something we do frequently. But does mind wandering resemble conventional scientific definitions of habits? Besides something we do frequently, habits are thought of as stimulus-response relationships that unfold in an automatic fashion (Neal, Wood, & Quinn, 2006; Verplanken, 2006; Verplanken & Orbell, 2003). In this chapter, we will examine in what respects mind wandering does and does not fit this definition. Finally, we will discuss how habitual mind wandering, or habitual patterns in our thinking, could be changed.

Frontiers in psychology, 2014

Psychological Bulletin, 2008

The author reviews research showing that repetitive thought (RT) can have constructive or unconstructive consequences. The main unconstructive consequences of RT are (a) depression, (b) anxiety, and (c) difficulties in physical health. The main constructive consequences of RT are (a) recovery from upsetting and traumatic events, (b) adaptive preparation and anticipatory planning, (c) recovery from depression, and (d) uptake of health-promoting behaviors. Several potential principles accounting for these distinct consequences of RT are identified within this review: (a) the valence of thought content, (b) the intrapersonal and situational context in which RT occurs, and (c) the level of construal (abstract vs. concrete processing) adopted during RT. Of the existing models of RT, it is proposed that an elaborated version of the control theory account provides the best theoretical framework to account for its distinct consequences.

Psychological Bulletin, 2010

Keywords: consciousness, spontaneous thought, experience monitoring, resting state, default state DOI: 10.1037/a0018726 What scientists expect their subjects to do may not be what those subjects end up doing. This point may be critical when researchers study spontaneous thoughts by assigning people a competing task, especially one that may be personally unimportant. The spontaneous stream of thought has been studied using thought reports concurrent with signal-detection tasks, asking subjects for both “task-related” and “task-unrelated” thoughts (Antrobus, 1999; Singer, 1993). Yet a tricky question emerges: When is the experimenter entitled to define task-relevance? After all, being in an experiment is only a fleeting episode in the subject’s life. When we use the term mind wandering for task-unrelated thoughts, we may be falling into the trap of believing that spontaneous thoughts are task unrelated in a deeper sense. A similar stigma is attached to terms like cognitive failures, resting state, rumination, distraction, attentional failures, absent-mindedness, repetitiveness, mind lapses, going AWOL in the brain, cortical idling, and the like (Smallwood, O’Connor, & Sudberry, 2007; Smallwood & Schooler, 2006). Indeed, the spontaneous activity of the brain during rest breaks from an experimental task was initially called a “default” or “resting state,” when it is in fact an extremely active state and one that is plausibly in pursuance of fundamental life tasks (Dehaene & Changeux, 2005; Delamillieure et al., 2009). Are we being misled by such tendentious labels? I believe we often are. William James remarked, when he was accused of being absent-minded, that he was really just present-minded to his own thoughts (Barzun, 1983). Smallwood and Schooler (2006) made a similar point by suggesting that “mind-wandering can be seen as a goal driven process” (p. 946). Nevertheless, Christoff, Gordon, Smallwood, Smith, and Schooler (2009) wrote that “neural recruitment in both default and executive network regions was strongest when subjects were unaware of their own mind wandering, suggesting that mind wandering is most pronounced when it lacks meta-awareness” (p. 8719). The problem is that human beings are likely to be the most deeply absorbed and hence the least self-aware during the most important experiences of their lives. The absence of self-consciousness at such times may not be mind-wandering but rather, as James called it, present-mindedness to what is most important. The stream of spontaneous thought is remarkably rich and self-relevant, reflecting one’s greatest personal concerns, interpersonal feelings, unfulfilled goals and unresolved challenges, worries and hopes, inner debates, self-monitoring, feelings of knowing, visual imagery, imaginary social interactions, recurrent beliefs, coping reactions, intrusive memories, daydreams and fantasies, future plans, and more—all of which are known to guide the stream of thought. Spontaneous ideation goes on during all of one’s waking hours, according to randomly timed thought-monitoring studies (Klinger, 1999; Singer & Salovey, 1999). However, it continues even during sleep. All humans have 90–120 min per night of REM dreams, which involve vivid, emotional, and dramatic experiences, judging by both brain activity and immediate reports (Payne, Stickgold, Swanberg, & Kensinger, 2008). Surprisingly, even slow-wave sleep shows reportable inner speech, 1 APA

Oxford Handbook of Spontaneous Thought, 2018

Our paper serves as an introduction to a budding field: the philosophy of mind-wandering. We begin with a philosophical critique of the standard psychological definitions of mind-wandering as task-unrelated or stimulus-independent. Although these definitions have helped bring mind-wandering research onto centre stage in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, they have substantial limitations that researchers must overcome to move forward. Specifically, the standard definitions do not account for (i) the dynamics of mind wandering, (ii) task-unrelated thought that does not qualify as mind-wandering, and (iii) the ways that mind-wandering can be task-related. We then survey three philosophical accounts that improve upon the current psychological definitions. We first present our account of mind-wandering as “unguided thinking”. Next we review Thomas Metzinger’s view that mind-wandering can be defined as thought lacking meta-awareness and cognitive agency, as well as Peter Carruthers’s and Fabian Dorsch’s definitions of mind-wandering as disunified thinking. We argue that these latter views are inadequate, and we show that our definition of mind-wandering as unguided thinking is not only conceptually and phenomenologically precise but also can be operationalized in a principled way for empirical research.