In the video clip "How To Tame Your Wandering Mind" A neuropsychologist Amishi Jha starts her presentation with the famous Morgan Freeman's quote "human beings only use 10 percent of their brain capacity"; and refutes it as false. On the contrary, she argues that human beings use 100 percent of their brain capacity. She regards as 100 percent energy-efficient organs that get fully utilized. According to her although the brain is at full capacity being utilized, the problems are that is suffers from information overload as it gets far too much from the environment that it can utilize. The brain, therefore, through evolution has device a problem-solving mechanism called attention to cope. Attention functions to allow humans to notice, select, and direct the brain the brain's resources. Amish regard attention as the leader of the brain that directs and determines what the rest of the brain has to follow.
Amish however, conducts series of studies to figure out whether the attention is always a good boss to the brain, why it often wander, and what can be done to improve paying attention to have more strength and better attention in our daily lives. She proceeds to give a real-life example of a Marine Captain Jeff Davis, someone that she knows very well. He had just returned from a battlefield and then drove on a bridge over the ocean, he could hardly see the beautiful sceneries and the marine and the visitor that were on the bridge, rather he was trying so much to focus driving so fast and to keep himself from driving off the bridge and into the ocean as he was feeling suicidal from his experiences at the battlefield.
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She further developed an experiment that uses electrolytes fitted on a swim cap to detect brain activity. The experiment allowed her and her team to measure a reliable brain signature that allows them to visualize things as they are. In the study, Amishi and her team found that the brain experiences internal destruction when the mind is wandering, causing them only to concentrate about 50 percent of the entire time they are expected to focus. This constant loss of attention is detrimental to human functioning especially to the efficiency of those in essential services like military personnel, judges, and magistrates as well as medical workers. The dire consequences of wandering attention might include errors, missing out information, and inability to come up with accurate decisions.
According to Amishi things that can cause the brain to wonder include stress which might cause an individual not just to rewind in the past, but also to stay there reanimating, reliving as well as regretting events that past. Stress can also cause the mind to fast forward unproductively to worry about the future and the things that might not even happen. As such, Amishi maintains that although attention is powerful to that affects our perception, it is also vulnerable and fragile and is diminished by mind-wandering and stress. Amish further describe the opposite of a stressful and wandering mind as mindfulness with no emotional reactivity with the current. She defines mindfulness as the ability to pay attention to the experiences of the present moment as they unfold in our lives. Carrying out activities to improve mindfulness can improve the ability of a person to improve on their attention. Amishi holds that although series of evidence have demonstrated people's attention to significantly decline especially when they are under high stress, training themselves to be more mindful can protect them from mind wandering during such times. Mindful people are more stable even under high stress, and the more individuals practice mindfulness, the more they get better.
An individual Caroline William provides an account of her discoveries about whether she procrastinates often and what she could do about it. She describes how she sat on the huge black sit as she tried to make herself comfortable when her head was being zapped with electromagnet tight cape to monitor her attention in the Boston Attention and Learning Lab by two neuroscientist Joe DeGutis and Easternman. Williams was surprised at the end of the online attention quizzes the test to have scored an error rate of 53 percent, as she needed 20 more points to be ranked as average. Several other online tests and quizzes further confirmed that Williams had an issue with distractibility and attention in her daily life as well as in the test lab environment. Although she admitted of having a reputation of not focusing on anything for long and had a countless task that she had begun but left them halfway through, she was happy to be informed that she had a room for improvement with an intensive brain training and stimulation.
Hopefully for individuals like Williams and many others whose attention is hijacked by things like social media, daydreaming, as well as sudden urges to take on other unrelated tasks; for there could be a way of helping them as suggested by Amish and other scholars. According to Robison, Gath, and Unsworth (2017), the circuits of the brain used in daily life improve their connections and become larger, whereas those that are not used shrink and might fade away. Given this malleability of the brain, it can be changed for the better. However, improvement of any desirable aspect of the brain calls for focusing attention on it. Szpunar (2017) found 80 percent of learners as well as 25 percent of adults interviewed to agree to be chronic procrastinators. The problem is particularly accelerated with the endless amount of distractions from social media, telecommunication gadgets as well as the internet.
A study conducted by two psychologist Daniel Gilbert and Matthew Killingsworth of the Havard University in 2010 to interrupt individuals during their work to find out what they were thinking and whether it made them happy or sad found that people were only as happy daydreaming as they were doing their tasks when they were daydreaming about pleasant things (Szpunar, 2017) . However, the rest of the period their mind wandered they felt less happy as they were when they focused on their jobs.
A way of controlling the wandering mind to attain a more productive and happier life would require first the identification of the things that causes the wandering. Robison, Gath, and Unsworth (2017) regard procrastination largely as an emotional problem that presents itself as a psychological coping strategy that begins with moments of stress. Szpunar (2017) maintains that since the human brain is by design selected to prefer immediate reward, through procrastination, it chooses to follow the paths of immediate feel-good activities over engagements despite knowing that neglecting engagements might have dire consequences.
Robison, Gath, and Unsworth (2017) agree on the detrimental impact mind wandering can have on the effectiveness of task execution. They, however, maintain that mind-wandering is not all that bad as a person can focus more when a wandering mind is controlled. According to Robisnson and colleagues giving the mind more to do reduce its distractibility. For instance, having a jazzy border or having some bit of background noise fills all the attentional slots in the mind granting no free space for other distractions. The study maintains that the theory is based on the notion that attention is a scarce resource that is most wanted by other free attention slots in the mind; consequently keeping the mind wandering. The three also observed that promising individuals of a greater reward at the end of a task significantly improved their attention and kept them alert; rather than giving them little rewards throughout tasks they considered as boring. Similarly, the study suggests holding frequent tests as a way of preventing the mind from wandering. Simple tests can be achieved by pausing after every 5 minutes to figure out if they could remember the information they had received. Robinson and colleagues maintain that when tests are given minds continue to wander, but within the topic or discussions; rather than wandering about other things out of context.
Szpunar (2017) identifies daydreaming during breaks, de-stressing as well as getting some nap as various ways of improving performance. According to the study, frequent stops to grant the mind some opportunity to wander can improve focus. As such, the study recommends taking intentional breaks to thing about unrelated things before resuming to the task. Similarly, distressing prevents the release of hormones such as the noradrenaline hormones which combine with receptors in the cognitive control circuits. Lower levels of noradrenaline make it difficult for the brain to begin wandering. Also, a lack of enough sleep negatively impacts the mental performance in general, by reducing the ability of the human brain to resist the external and internal distracters. As such sleep helps the mind to focus more. Szpunar also suggests allowing individuals to doodle about subjects related to the topic as a way of improving intentional mind-wandering that consequently improves attention.
In summary, mindfulness causes an individual to feel generally more focused and calmer because it changes the functioning of the brain over time. As such individuals improve their ability to stick to their engagements when they need to; rather than getting into a mind-wandering state.
References
Szpunar, K. K. (2017). Directing the wandering mind. Current Directions in Psychological Science , 26 (1), 40-44.
Robison, M. K., Gath, K. I., & Unsworth, N. (2017). The neurotic wandering mind: An individual differences investigation of neuroticism, mind-wandering, and executive control. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology , 70 (4), 649-663.
Williams, C. (2014, October 16). Concentrate! How to tame a wandering mind. Retrieved from: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20141015-concentrate-how-to-focus-better
Jha, A. (2018, March 23). How to tame your wandering mind [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/amishi_jha_how_to_tame_your_wandering_mind/up-next .
