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Mind-wandering.

INTRODUCTION.

The heart goes where the head takes it, and neither cares much about the

whereabouts of the feet.”

Still, even if people are less happy when their minds

wander, which causes which? Could the mind-wandering be a consequence

rather than a cause of unhappiness?

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The NLP Secret.

A quick experiment. Before proceeding to the next paragraph, let your mind

wander wherever it wants to go. Close your eyes for a few seconds, starting ...

now.

And now, welcome back for the hypothesis of our experiment: Wherever

your mind went — the South Seas, your job, your lunch, your unpaid bills —

that daydreaming is not likely to make you as happy as focusing intensely on

the rest of this column will.

I’m not sure I believe this prediction, but I can

assure you it is based on an enormous amount of daydreaming cataloged in the

current issue of Science.

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Using an iPhone app called trackyourhappiness, psychologists at Harvard

contacted people around the world at random intervals to ask how they were

feeling, what they were doing and what they were thinking.

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The least surprising finding, based on a quarter-million responses from more

than 2,200 people, was that the happiest people in the world were the ones in

the midst of enjoying sex. Or at least they were enjoying it until the iPhone

interrupted.

The researchers are not sure how many of them stopped to pick up

the phone and how many waited until afterward to respond. Nor, unfortunately,

is there any way to gauge what thoughts — happy, unhappy, murderous —

went through their partners’ minds when they tried to resume.

When asked to

rate their feelings on a scale of 0 to 100, with 100 being “very good,” the

people having sex gave an average rating of 90. That was a good 15 points

higher than the next-best activity, exercising, which was followed closely by

conversation, listening to music, taking a walk, eating, praying and meditating,

cooking, shopping, taking care of one’s children and reading. Near the bottom

of the list were personal grooming, commuting and working.

When asked their

thoughts, the people in flagrante were models of concentration: only 10

percent of the time did their thoughts stray from their endeavors. But when

people were doing anything else, their minds wandered at least 30 percent of

the time, and as much as 65 percent of the time (recorded during moments of

personal grooming, clearly a less than scintillating enterprise).

On average

throughout all the quarter-million responses, minds were wandering 47 percent

of the time.

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That figure surprised the researchers, Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel

Gilbert.

“I find it kind of weird now to look down a crowded street and realize

that half the people aren’t really there,” Dr. Gilbert says.

You might suppose

that if people’s minds wander while they’re having fun, then those stray

thoughts are liable to be about something pleasant — and that was indeed the

case with those happy campers having sex.

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But for the other 99.5 percent of the people, there was no correlation between

the joy of the activity and the pleasantness of their thoughts.

“Even if you’re

doing something that’s really enjoyable,” Mr. Killingsworth says, “that doesn’t

seem to protect against negative thoughts. The rate of mind-wandering is

lower for more enjoyable activities, but when people wander they are just as

likely to wander toward negative thoughts.”

Whatever people were doing,

whether it was having sex or reading or shopping, they tended to be happier if

they focused on the activity instead of thinking about something else. In fact,

whether and where their minds wandered was a better predictor of happiness

than what they were doing.

“If you ask people to imagine winning the lottery,”

Dr. Gilbert says, “they typically talk about the things they would do — ‘I’d go

to Italy, I’d buy a boat, I’d lay on the beach’ — and they rarely mention the

things they would think .

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But our data suggest that the location of the body is much less important than

the location of the mind, and that the former has surprisingly little influence on

the latter. The heart goes where the head takes it, and neither cares much

about the whereabouts of the feet.”

Still, even if people are less happy when

their minds wander, which causes which? Could the mind-wandering be a

consequence rather than a cause of unhappiness?

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To investigate cause and effect, the Harvard psychologists compared each

person’s moods and thoughts as the day went on. They found that if someone’s

mind wandered at, say, 10 in the morning, then at 10:15 that person was likely

to be less happy than at 10 , perhaps because of those stray thoughts. But if

people were in a bad mood at 10, they weren’t more likely to be worrying or

daydreaming at 10:15.

“We see evidence for mind-wandering causing

unhappiness, but no evidence for unhappiness causing mind-wandering,” Mr.

Killingsworth says.

This result may disappoint daydreamers, but it’s in keeping

with the religious and philosophical admonitions to “Be Here Now,” as the yogi

Ram Dass titled his 1971 book. The phrase later became the title of a George

Harrison song warning that “a mind that likes to wander ’round the corner is an

unwise mind.”

What psychologists call “flow” — immersing your mind fully in

activity — has long been advocated by nonpsychologists. “Life is not long,”

Samuel Johnson said, “and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation

how it shall be spent.” Henry Ford was more blunt: “Idleness warps the mind.”

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The iPhone results jibe nicely with one of the favorite sayings of William F.

Buckley Jr.: “Industry is the enemy of melancholy.”

Alternatively, you could

interpret the iPhone data as support for the philosophical dictum of Bobby

McFerrin: “Don’t worry, be happy.” The unhappiness produced by mind-

wandering was largely a result of the episodes involving “unpleasant” topics.

Such stray thoughts made people more miserable than commuting or working

or any other activity.

But the people having stray thoughts on “neutral” topics

ranked only a little below the overall average in happiness. And the ones

daydreaming about “pleasant” topics were actually a bit above the average,

although not quite as happy as the people whose minds were not wandering.

There are times, of course, when unpleasant thoughts are the most useful

thoughts. “Happiness in the moment is not the only reason to do something,”

says Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa

Barbara. His research has shown that mind-wandering can lead people to

creative solutions of problems, which could make them happier in the long

term.

Over the several months of the iPhone study, though, the more frequent

mind-wanderers remained less happy than the rest, and the moral — at least

for the short-term — seems to be: you stray, you pay. So if you’ve been able

to stay focused to the end of this column, perhaps you’re happier than when

you daydreamed at the beginning. If not, you can go back to daydreaming

starting...now.

Or you could try focusing on something else that is now, at long

last, scientifically guaranteed to improve your mood. Just make sure you turn

the phone off.■

ARTICLE IN THE NY TIMES.

By JOHN TIERNEY.

November 16, 2010

From the desk of Paul Thompson.

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