Brain Fitness Tip of the Week: Should You Focus or Let Your Mind Wander?

An interesting study is reported in the online version of Discover magazine suggesting that mind wandering is an important part of mental functioning. You can find the article here. Researchers asked people to pay attention to a task while their brain activity was recorded in a special scanner called a functional magnetic resonance imager (fMRI). At intervals they asked the people of they were paying attention to the task. Many people weren’t paying attention and were letting their mind wander. Its’ interesting to know that until they were asked, many of these people didn’t know that their minds were no longer focused on the task.

The researchers went back to the results of the fMRI scans and looked at what the mind wanderers’ brains were doing when they weren’t paying attention. They found that the parts of the brain that were active at those times were related to thinking about yourself and planning for the future. The suggest that the mind has a way of switching back and forth between paying attention in the present and thinking about and planning for the future. So letting your mind wander may have some benefits.

In contrast, an article that appeared earlier this year in the Journal of Experimental Psychology (available here; scroll down to the article titled “Conducting the Train of Thought . . .”) showed that mind wandering was related to poorer working memory functioning. Since working memory function, in general, becomes worse as we get older, this finding presents the possibility that older persons may have the tendency to let their minds wander more than do younger persons.

This would be an explanation for the most common complaint I hear from people about their memory. People tell me “I went in another room to get something and I couldn’t remember what it was.” If your mind wanders in the middle of a task such as finding something, it may give you the impression that your memory isn’t working. It may not be so much your memory itself, but your ability to control whether your mind wanders.

Computer brain training in a brain gym is one way to help improve this ability. Most brain training programs require people to pay attention for extended periods. Both the programs from Posit Science and available on line at Lumosity may train your ability to pay attention. I’m also intrigued by the possibility that coping with stress and improving your mood may help with attention, since both depression and stress have a negative impact on a person’s ability to pay attention. Some types of meditation, too, can help train attention. More studies of all of these interventions are needed to help us figure out whether attention training can help older people improve their everyday memory.