Those who appear to be constantly distracted or drift often to thoughts have more ‘working memory’ and 'sharper brains', a new study suggests.
Published online in the Psychological Science journal the new report indicates that a wandering mind is a form of a mental workspace that allows you to juggle multiple thoughts simultaneously.
During the study, volunteers were asked to perform one of two simple tasks during which researchers checked to ask if the participants’ minds were wandering. At the end, participants measured their working memory capacity by their ability to remember a series of letters interspersed with simple maths questions. Daniel Levinson, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States, said that those with higher working memory capacity reported “more mind wandering during these simple tasks”, but their performance did not suffer.
Dr Jonathan Smallwood, of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Science in Leipzig, Germany, said: “What this study seems to suggest is that, when circumstances for the task aren’t very difficult, people who have additional working memory resources deploy them to think about things other than what they’re doing.”
Working memory capacity is also associated with general measures of intelligence, such as reading comprehension and IQ scores, and also offers a window into the widespread, but not well understood, realm of internally driven thoughts.
Published online in the Psychological Science journal the new report indicates that a wandering mind is a form of a mental workspace that allows you to juggle multiple thoughts simultaneously.
During the study, volunteers were asked to perform one of two simple tasks during which researchers checked to ask if the participants’ minds were wandering. At the end, participants measured their working memory capacity by their ability to remember a series of letters interspersed with simple maths questions. Daniel Levinson, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States, said that those with higher working memory capacity reported “more mind wandering during these simple tasks”, but their performance did not suffer.
Dr Jonathan Smallwood, of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Science in Leipzig, Germany, said: “What this study seems to suggest is that, when circumstances for the task aren’t very difficult, people who have additional working memory resources deploy them to think about things other than what they’re doing.”
Working memory capacity is also associated with general measures of intelligence, such as reading comprehension and IQ scores, and also offers a window into the widespread, but not well understood, realm of internally driven thoughts.
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