You may have been taught that letting your mind wander is a sign of being unfocused and lazy. In school, students are called out for not looking fully attentive. At work, employees are viewed as unproductive for not only focusing on their work the entire day.
However, letting your mind wander is “essential for things to make sense” (Hari).
In Johann Hari’s book, Stolen Focus, he interviews two experts on the subject of mind-wandering: Nathan Spreng, a professor of neurology and neurosurgery, and Jonathon Smallwood, a professor of psychology. After researching, Hari identified three critical processes that occur during mind-wandering: making sense of the world, generating solutions, and predicting the future.
CLOCKING IN WHILE CHECKING OUT
Mind-wandering is how you make sense of the world around you. When absorbing information or reading, you cannot help but start thinking about how these words relate to your personal life, how parts of your reading connect to other parts, and even guessing what the author is going to say next.
Sorry to break the fourth wall… I write these blogs for my master’s program. Reading this book and writing my own posts is one of my ongoing assignments. As I read Hari’s explanation of creating these connections while reading, it felt like an out-of-body experience because I was doing just that, absorbing the reading, and trying to form ideas for my next post.
Hari points out that this process, “is reading. If you weren’t letting your mind wander a little bit right now, you wouldn’t really be reading this book in a way that would make sense to you. Having enough mental space to roam is essential for you to be able to understand a book” (Hari).
PROBLEM-SOLVING IN SPACE
Creating these new connections while thinking is how you produce solutions to problems. Spreng told Haru that “Creativity is not [where you create] some new thing that’s emerged from your brain… It’s a new association between two things that were already there.” Allowing your mind to wander allows thoughts to expand and connect with other thoughts.
WANDER INTO THE PAST
“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” (Hari). When you are in a situation and can only focus on one idea at a time, it can be hard for you to navigate it successfully. By letting your mind wander, you can evaluate past experiences and their outcomes. Then you will be more prepared to handle the current situation and what might come next.
WHEN TO ROAM
As a graphic designer, I am constantly problem-solving to address the brief I am given. In a creative role, mind-wandering is essential to the quality of work I can produce. You don’t always get that immediate vision in your head when you sit down to start drafting layouts. To really get into a project, you sometimes need to walk away from it. Instead of forcing yourself to only focus on this one problem, give your mind space and time to wander.
Resources
Hari, J. (2023). Stolen Focus. Crown.
LAUREN SCOOPO 