Are Your Minds Wandering?

Dr. Smallwood believes that this default mode, as he calls it, of mind wandering is in fact normal for everybody and even necessary for any thinking that requires knowledge. A more recent study had people in a scanner room reading short factual sentences on a screen. They would instead be focused on remembering things from their past. And that means… That the brain scans of these individuals looked almost identical to brain scans of mind wanders. This shows that mind wandering is at least partially, if not mostly, related to memory retrieval.

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