The Wandering Mind

Parents, teachers, bosses spend hours asking their constituencies to pay attention, to focus.  Yet wandering minds are common--even in the best of us.  In fact, for a full 50% of our waking hours, our minds are not focused on tasks at hand.  And rest assured, this is actually a good thing.   We are biologically disposed to alternate between paying attention and thinking about something else. Do these lapses provide the rest and relaxation our brains need to recover from periods of concentration?  Or are these neurological interludes purely for pleasure?

In The Wandering Mind, Corballis argues that mind-wandering has many constructive and adaptive features.  These range from  mental time travelthe wandering back and forth through time, not only to plan our futures based on past experience, but also to generate a continuous sense of who we are--to the ability to inhabit the minds of others, increasing empathy and social understanding. Through mind-wandering, we invent, tell stories, and expand our mental horizons. Mind wandering , hardly the sign of a faulty network or aimless distraction, actually underwrites creativity, whether as a Wordsworth wandering lonely as a cloud, or an Einstein imagining himself travelling on a beam of light.  Corballis takes readers on a mental journey in chapters that can be savored piecemeal, as the minds of readers wander in different ways, and sometimes have limited attentional capacity. 

Rooted in neuroscience, psychology and evolutionary biology, but written with Corballis' signature wit and wisdom,The Wandering Mind illuminates those murky regions of the brain where dreams and religion, fiction and fantasy lurk.