Age Wise
Why You Should Embrace Your Wandering Mind
Daydreaming and distraction are normal, even wonderful
When healthy young adults were pitted against healthy older people in mindless tasks for a recent research project, a surprising thing happened. The older folks scored lower on cognitive tests, yet each group ultimately performed the same on the boring task at hand. How? The older group essentially made lemonade from mental lemons by not letting their minds wander as much.
“Older adults appear to mitigate the negative aspects of cognitive decline by increasing motivation and adopting more efficient strategies to suspend the wandering mind when focus is required,” says study team member Paul Dockree, PhD, an associate professor of psychology at Trinity College Dublin. “Older adults can be more focused, less impeded by anxiety and less mentally restless than younger adults.”
The findings, published earlier this year in the journal Psychology and Aging, could almost make you look forward to brain aging. Almost. See, mind-wandering is actually a wonderful thing, as long as you’re able to manage it when you need to.
