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In one recent survey, 83 percent of Americans responded that they didn’t spend
any
time whatsoever “relaxing or thinking” in the twenty-four-hour period before they were
surveyed. Another study sought to measure exactly how resistant participants were to
mind wandering. In the first stage of the study, researchers attached two shock
electrodes to participants’ ankles, zapped them, and then asked how much the
participants would pay to not receive the shock again. Around three quarters of the
group agreed they’d pay to not receive the shock again. In the second stage,
participants were left alone with their thoughts for fifteen minutes. The researchers kept
the electrodes
on during that time, on the off chance anyone wanted to shock himself
again, saving himself from his own thoughts. This is where the study gets interesting,
and somewhat sad. A full
71 percent
of men in the study chose to self-administer an
electric shock when left alone with their thoughts. Women fared better: only 26 percent
chose to shock themselves again. (Take from these findings what you will.) This pattern
held true regardless of age, education, economic status, and distraction level of the
participants. The results are especially depressing when you consider
that researchers
allowed participants to proceed to this second stage only if they agreed to pay to not
receive the shock again
—anyone who didn’t mind the shock was rejected.
If you read a lot of books like this one, you’re probably familiar with the concept that
our brains are wired for survival and reproduction
—not to do knowledge work day in and
day out. We focus on certain objects of attention by default, and doing so is what has
allowed the human species to survive. We’ve already discussed the first type of object
of attention that draws us in: anything that’s
novel
. This is
what makes our smartphones
and other devices so enticing, while we find less novel tasks
—like writing a report—
boring, regardless of how much they lead us to accomplish.
We’re also more likely to focus on anything that’s
pleasurable
or
threatening
. This is
where the survival instinct kicks in. Pleasures like sex and overeating have enabled us
to reproduce and store fat for when food inevitably became scarce. Focusing on the
threats in our environment, like the snake slithering nearby as our early ancestors built a
fire, enabled us to live another day. We’ve crafted the world around us
to cater to these
cravings for novel, pleasurable, and threatening objects of attention. Consider this the
next time you turn on the TV, open YouTube, read a news website, or check social
media
—these outlets provide a steady fix of all three.
Today the balance of these three objects of attention has been tipped. We’re
continually surrounded by novel
distractions, pleasures are plentiful, and legitimate
threats are few and far between. The wiring in our brain that in our evolutionary past led
us to store sugars and have sex as a survival mechanism now leads us to overindulge
in fast food and pornography. Continually scanning for threats is what compels us to
dwell on that one negative email or overthink a careless offhand comment from our
boss. What once aided our chances at survival now sabotages our productivity and
creativity in the modern world. It makes our most urgent tasks feel a lot more important
than they actually are.
We’re also prone to falling prey to what’s novel, pleasurable, and threatening when
we let our mind wander and turn our attention inward. Our
greatest threats, worries, and
fears no longer reside in our external environment but within the depths of our own
consciousness. When our mind wanders, it slips into a pattern of ruminating on the
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stupid things we’ve said, the arguments we’ve won and lost, and worries about work
and money. This is also true of pleasurable thoughts
—we daydream of memorable
meals, recall memories from a great vacation, or fantasize about how great we’d feel if
we had come up with a witty retort to something said earlier. The next time you meditate
(
if you’ve begun to do so), pay attention to how your mind is naturally drawn to the
threats, pleasures, and novel ideas floating in your head.
But in practice we don’t actually experience negative mind-wandering episodes that
often. Our mind primarily wanders to the negative when we’re thinking about the past,
but we wander
to the past just
12 percent of the time
—the remainder is spent thinking
about the present and the future, which makes scatterfocus remarkably productive.
While our evolutionary history leads us to think about the novel and the negative, it has
also wired our brain for profound creativity whenever we turn our attention inward. I
’d
argue that our ability to do so is practically a superpower.
Compared with other mammals, our ability to think about something that’s not
immediately in front of us is fairly unique.
*
It affords us the ability to plan for the future,
learn from the past, and have daydreams that spawn remarkable insights. It helps us
search inwardly for solutions to external situations
—whether we’re solving a math
problem or telling the server how we usually take our eggs. Most remarkable,
scatterfocus enables us to step back from life and to work and live more intentionally.
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