Quotes About Mind-wandering

Activities that promote mind-wandering, such as reading literature, going for a walk, exercising, or listening to music, are hugely restorative.

Creativity is not [where you create] some new thing that's emerged from your brain," Nathan told me. "It's a new association between two things that were already there." Mind-wandering allows "more extended trains of thought to unfold, which allows for more associations to be made.

Up until I met these scientists, I thought that mind-wandering—what I was doing in Provincetown so much, and so pleasurably—was the opposite of attention, and that's why I felt guilty about doing it. I realized I was wrong. It is actually a different form of attention—and a necessary one.

they are degrading the quality of our thinking. Without mind-wandering, we find it harder to make sense of the world—and in the jammed-up state of confusion that creates, we become even more vulnerable to the next source of distraction that comes along.

three crucial things that are happening during mind-wandering. First, you are slowly making sense of the world.

Third, during mind-wandering, your mind will—Nathan said—engage in "mental time-travel," where it roams over the past and tries to predict the future.

Embrace the faff. Stare out of the window. Bend paperclips. Stand in the middle of the room trying to remember what you came downstairs for. Pace. Drum your fingertips. Move papers around. Hum. Look at the garden.

Easy distractibility, trouble focusing attention, tendency to tune out or drift away in the middle of a page or a conversation, often coupled with an ability to hyperfocus at times.

Monkey-mind" describes an especially agitated state where attention jumps rapidly from one thing to the next, like an excited monkey. This is quite different from mind-wandering, which happens at a slower pace. With

When you're a creative person, there are just times when you're not listening. You know, I could be looking right at you and thinking about something else.

I knew what he was doing. He was walking away from his thoughts but his thoughts were staying with him.

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.