scholarly journals The wandering mind, the focussed mind and the meta-aware mind

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ganesh Bharate ◽  
Sumantran Ray
Keyword(s):  
Mind Wandering ◽  
Industrial Society ◽  
Attention Training ◽  
Mental Life ◽  
Practical Application ◽  
Contemplative Practices ◽  
Negative Thoughts ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Training Exercises ◽  
Contemplative Traditions

Caught within fast paced- urban industrial society, many of us may not ask questions about the nature of our mind, thoughts, although our mind, and thoughts often cause distress to us. Stressed between demands of tasks, and unexpected situations like pandemic loneliness, our paper offers useful insights into the dynamics of consciousness- the wandering mind (intentional, & unintentional mind-wandering), focussed mind, the meta-aware mind (mindfulness). We comparatively analyse results from contemplative traditions (Buddhism, & Yoga), CognitivePhenomenology, and Cognitive Psychology (Attention, working memory), with focus on attention training exercises (meditative practises). What is the relation between attention, and our thoughts? How can we train our attention, by practising meta-awareness, to effectively manage distressing thoughts, and emotions? How do the concepts of intentionality, and meta-awareness bear on the problem of differentiating between intentional consciously controlled, and unintentional automatic mind-wandering ? If, as Metzinger suggests, our mental life is oftencharacterized by sub-personal cognition, loss of mental autonomy, then what practices may help us to cultivate intentionality & meta-awareness? Does sub-personal cognition (e.g.mind-wandering) necessarily involve loss of agency, or as Seli has suggested, there are specific subtypes of mind-wandering that preserves intentionality and meta-awareness (at least at some later part of the time of the mind-wandering episode). In a convergence betweenapplication of Intentional Mind Wandering positive Self Generated Thoughts, and contemplative practices, suggested in the Patanjali Yoga tradition, we suggest a generalized meditative technique to counterbalance distressing thoughts. Commonly experienced distressing thoughts like aggression, jealousy, lust, despondency can be counter-balanced by systematically cultivating (Pratipaksha bhavana) opposing, and virtuous thoughts as further developed in the paper. Our paper explores, with focus on practical application via meditative practises, synergy between intentional mind wandering, meta-awareness (Sakshi bhava), Virtuous attitude Cultivation which have been shown to be effective in managing distressing thoughts e.g. depressogenic automatic negative thoughts.

Negative and Positive Mind-Wandering

2021 ◽  
pp. 177-192
Author(s):  
Frederick Travis
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Processing ◽  
Mind Wandering ◽  
Essential Elements ◽  
Current Situation ◽  
Mental Life ◽  
Negative Thoughts ◽  
The Mind

Mind-wandering is considered by many as a sign of an “unhappy mind” and associated with ill-health. Since the mind wanders half of the time, it is unlikely that mind-wandering plays no role in cognitive processing. Mind-wandering can be filled with negative thoughts ‑ negative mind-wandering associated with worry and rumination; or it can be filled with positive thoughts ‑ positive mind-wandering associated with imagination and fantasy, essential elements of a healthy, satisfying mental life. Mind-wandering with positive thoughts enables the mind to escape the constraints of the current situation and explore novel solutions.

The Oxford Handbook of Spontaneous Thought

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Clinical Practice ◽  
Human Brain ◽  
History Education ◽  
Mental Life ◽  
Human History ◽  
External Sources ◽  
Spontaneous Thought ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Contemplative Traditions ◽  
The Brain

Where do spontaneous thoughts come from? It may be surprising that the seemingly straightforward answers, “from the mind” or “from the brain,” are in fact an incredibly recent, modern understanding of the origins of spontaneous thought. For nearly all of human history, our thoughts—especially the most sudden, insightful, and important—were almost universally ascribed to divine or other external sources. Scientific understanding of spontaneous thought has progressed by leaps and bounds in recent years, but big questions still loom: What, exactly, is spontaneous thought? How does the human brain generate, elaborate, and evaluate its own spontaneous creations? And why do spontaneous thoughts feature so prominently in mental life? This volume brings together views from neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, history, education, contemplative traditions, and clinical practice in order to begin to address the ubiquitous, yet still mysterious, spontaneous workings of the mind. The Oxford Handbook of Spontaneous Thought is the first book of its kind to bring such highly diverse perspectives to bear on answering the what, why, and how of spontaneous mental phenomena.

Psychology: Volume 5

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World View ◽  
Science Volume ◽  
Western World ◽  
Mental Life ◽  
Long Time ◽  
The Difference ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Indian Setting ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Relationship

This survey of research on psychology in five volumes is a part of a series undertaken by the ICSSR since 1969, which covers various disciplines under social science. Volume Five of this survey, Explorations into Psyche and Psychology: Some Emerging Perspectives, examines the future of psychology in India. For a very long time, intellectual investments in understanding mental life have led to varied formulations about mind and its functions across the word. However, a critical reflection of the state of the disciplinary affairs indicates the dominance of Euro-American theories and methods, which offer an understanding coloured by a Western world view, which fails to do justice with many non-Western cultural settings. The chapters in this volume expand the scope of psychology to encompass indigenous knowledge available in the Indian tradition and invite engaging with emancipatory concerns as well as broadening the disciplinary base. The contributors situate the difference between the Eastern and Western conceptions of the mind in the practice of psychology. They look at this discipline as shaped by and shaping between systems like yoga. They also analyse animal behaviour through the lens of psychology and bring out insights about evolution of individual and social behaviour. This volume offers critique the contemporary psychological practices in India and offers a new perspective called ‘public psychology’ to construe and analyse the relationship between psychologists and their objects of study. Finally, some paradigmatic, pedagogical, and substantive issues are highlighted to restructure the practice of psychology in the Indian setting.

The Wandering Eye: An Eye Tracking Approach to Mind Wandering

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Schnabel
Keyword(s):  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Task Performance ◽  
Target Location ◽  
External Environment ◽  
Mind Wandering ◽  
Individual Characteristics ◽  
Moving Target ◽  
Tracking Data ◽  
The Mind

Mind wandering, or “daydreaming,” is a shift in the contents of a thought away from a task and/or event in the external environment, to self-generated thoughts and feelings. This research seeks to test the reliability of eye tracking as an objective of measure mind wandering using the Wandering Eye Paradigm, as well as examine the relationships between mind wandering and individual characteristics. Fifty participants will be recruited for two appointments a day apart, on each day on each day completing two eye tracking sessions following a moving target. In this task, participants will be instructed to press the space bar if they feel they are mind wandering, and then answer three questions about their episode content. Questionnaires measuring mind wandering, procrastination, mindfulness, creativity and personality (in particular conscientiousness) will be completed between eye tracking sessions. By comparing the eye tracking data in the period prior to the spacebar press we can determine quantifiable indicators of the onset and duration of mind wandering episodes by analyzing gaze location in relation to the target location. It has been hypothesized that severity of task performance failures (losing track of the target) should correlate with the “depth” of the mind wandering episode content. Additionally, we expect the frequency of mind wandering episodes to correlate with individual characteristics, and that these measures will be consistent across trials. This research would provide a novel objective way to identify and measure mind wandering, and would help further advance the understanding of its behavioral and subjective dimensions.

scholarly journals Catching the wandering mind: Meditation as a window into spontaneous thought

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wendy Hasenkamp
Keyword(s):  
Mind Wandering ◽  
Neural Correlates ◽  
Physiological Measures ◽  
Great Utility ◽  
Spontaneous Thought ◽  
New Research ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Subjective Reports ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Research Recommendations

This chapter considers a form of attention-based meditation as a novel means to gain insight into the mechanisms and phenomenology of spontaneous thought. Focused attention (FA) meditation involves keeping one’s attention on a chosen object, and repeatedly catching the mind when it strays from the object into spontaneous thought. This practice can thus be viewed as a kind of self-caught mind wandering paradigm, which suggests it may have great utility for research on spontaneous thought. Current findings about the effects of meditation on mind wandering and meta-awareness are reviewed, and implications for new research paradigms that leverage first-person reporting during FA meditation are discussed. Specifically, research recommendations are made that may enable customized analysis of individual episodes of mind wandering and their neural correlates. It is hoped that by combining detailed subjective reports from experienced meditators with rigorous objective physiological measures, we can advance our understanding of human consciousness.

scholarly journals For Whom the Mind Wanders, and When, Varies Across Laboratory and Daily-Life Settings

2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (9) ◽  
pp. 1271-1289 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Kane ◽  
Georgina M. Gross ◽  
Charlotte A. Chun ◽  
Bridget A. Smeekens ◽  
Matt E. Meier ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Executive Control ◽  
Life Experience ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Working Memory Capacity ◽  
Memory Capacity ◽  
Mind Wandering ◽  
Personality Factors ◽  
Laboratory Findings ◽  
The Mind

Undergraduates ( N = 274) participated in a weeklong daily-life experience-sampling study of mind wandering after being assessed in the lab for executive-control abilities (working memory capacity; attention-restraint ability; attention-constraint ability; and propensity for task-unrelated thoughts, or TUTs) and personality traits. Eight times a day, electronic devices prompted subjects to report on their current thoughts and context. Working memory capacity and attention abilities predicted subjects’ TUT rates in the lab, but predicted the frequency of daily-life mind wandering only as a function of subjects’ momentary attempts to concentrate. This pattern replicates prior daily-life findings but conflicts with laboratory findings. Results for personality factors also revealed different associations in the lab and daily life: Only neuroticism predicted TUT rate in the lab, but only openness predicted mind-wandering rate in daily life (both predicted the content of daily-life mind wandering). Cognitive and personality factors also predicted dimensions of everyday thought other than mind wandering, such as subjective judgments of controllability of thought. Mind wandering in people’s daily environments and TUTs during controlled and artificial laboratory tasks have different correlates (and perhaps causes). Thus, mind-wandering theories based solely on lab phenomena may be incomplete.

Mind, Body and Embarrassment in Henry James’s The Awkward Age

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Attridge
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Mental Life ◽  
Expressive Vocabulary ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
Public Behavior ◽  
Modernist Novel ◽  
The Mind

This chapter considers James’s The Awkward Age (1899) in the context of fin de siècle mental science and its preoccupation, most evident in theories of emotion, with the materiality of the mind. Contributing to recent accounts that challenge the commonplace equation between psychological depth and James’s transition to modernist novel, the chapter argues that The Awkward Age represents mental life – and in particular awkwardness – as public behavior rather than introspection, self-presence and interiority. In a similar fashion to late-Victorian mental scientists (including his brother, William), James was concerned with finding a vocabulary for representing mental life in physical terms, demonstrating the interrelation of mind and body. James’s use of a behavioural rather than expressive vocabulary for embarrassment determines the shape of the novel’s plot and forms part of its critique of a Victorian prudery that presupposes a mind-matter separation.

The Non-existence of the Internal World

2020 ◽  
pp. 81-151
Author(s):  
Jan Westerhoff
Keyword(s):  
External World ◽  
Sharp Contrast ◽  
Mental Life ◽  
Complete Control ◽  
Limited Knowledge ◽  
Natural Place ◽  
Inner World ◽  
Five Senses ◽  
The Mind

A natural place of retreat once the reality of the mind-independent world has been challenged is that of the certainty of our inner world, a world which, we assume, is perfectly transparent to us and over which we have complete control, which provides a sharp contrast with an external world of which we have limited knowledge, and which frequently resists our attempts to influence it. The second chapter considers a set of reasons against the existence of this kind of internal world. I consider arguments critical of introspective certainty and query the existence of a substantial self that acts as a central unifier of our mental life. The chapter concludes that a foundation in the internal world remains elusive: our introspective capacities do not give us any more of a secure grasp of an internal world than our five senses perceiving the external world.

scholarly journals The Mediating Role of Affects between Mind-Wandering and Happiness

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (12) ◽  
pp. 5139
Author(s):  
Carlos Salavera ◽  
Pablo Usán
Keyword(s):  
Negative Affect ◽  
Mind Wandering ◽  
Positive And Negative Affect ◽  
Subjective Happiness ◽  
Mediating Role ◽  
Positive Effects ◽  
Subjective Happiness Scale ◽  
Average Happiness ◽  
The Mind

The aim of this study was to assess the mediating role of affects between mind-wandering and happiness. The study was conducted with a sample comprising 270 university students—133 men (49.26%) and 137 women (50.74%)—who filled out the Mind-Wandering Questionnaire (MWQ), the Positive and Negative Affect Questionnaire (PANAS), and the SHS subjective happiness scale. Mind-wandering was found to be negatively correlated with happiness and positive effects. Higher mind-wandering-related scores went hand in hand with scores related to both lower happiness and positive affects. Approximately half the participants yielded low mind-wandering and negative affect scores and above-average happiness and positive affects scores. In addition, one in four scored above average in terms of mind-wandering and low in terms of happiness and positive effects. Finally, the mediating role played by affects was examined. It can be concluded that although in principle mind-wandering has no direct effect on happiness, some influence can be attested when affects, both positive and negative, are taken into consideration.

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