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.
What your wandering mind says about you
Mind-wandering is often viewed as a mark of unproductivity, lack of control, even laziness. But in a healthy mind it’s normal, helping the brain quietly cogitate on experiences and plan next moves.
Einstein is said to have come up with his theory of relativity while daydreaming. You may not be an Einstein, but surely you’ve experienced your own little unexpected epiphanies, those light-bulb moments when you’re not thinking about the thing you were trying to think about and suddenly the answer pops into your head. Maybe in the shower, while walking or driving, or during a workout.
A wandering mind can in fact be a sign of intelligence and ingenuity.
In one study from 2017, scientists tested people on cognitive and creative skills. Questionnaires gauged the amount of daydreaming the participants typically experienced. Then brain scans revealed what was going on in their heads as they tried to focus on something simple. Daydreaming was linked to more smarts and heightened…