Zoning Out is not Mindlessness

Discover magazine published an interesting story about wandering minds and zoning out.  It seems that even though our minds might wander from a task, however important it is, some key processing is going on.

…mind wandering is not useless mental static. Instead, Schooler proposes, mind wandering allows us to work through some important thinking. Our brains process information to reach goals, but some of those goals are immediate while others are distant. Somehow we have evolved a way to switch between handling the here and now and contemplating long-term objectives. It may be no coincidence that most of the thoughts that people have during mind wandering have to do with the future.

Studies have shown that sometimes we’re aware of our mind wander and sometimes we’re not, but the mind is always doing something regardless of the presence of metathought. Discover goes on to state:

Even more telling is the discovery that zoning out may be the most fruitful type of mind wandering. In their fMRI study, Schooler and his colleagues found that the default network and executive control systems are even more active during zoning out than they are during the less extreme mind wandering with awareness. When we are no longer even aware that our minds are wandering, we may be able to think most deeply about the big picture.

Because a fair amount of mind wandering happens without our ever noticing, the solutions it lets us reach may come as a surprise. There are many stories in the history of science of great discoveries occurring to people out of the blue. The French mathematician Henri Poincaré once wrote about how he struggled for two weeks with a difficult mathematical proof. He set it aside to take a bus to a geology conference, and the moment he stepped on the bus, the solution came to him. It is possible that mind wandering led him to the solution. John Kounios of Drexel University and his colleagues have done brain scans that capture the moment when people have a sudden insight that lets them solve a word puzzle. Many of the regions that become active during those creative flashes belong to the default network and the executive control system as well.

It seems apparent that there is thought that we cannot attend to consciously.  Is this non-attentional thought (using the word unconscious is too loaded) going on all the time?  When we remember something when we stop trying to remember it (that word on the tip of our tongues) does that me that our attentional thought processes and non-attentional thought processes are mutually exclusion; that they get in each others way?

And what are the implications for mindfulness?  Is the goal of mindfulness antithetical to non-attentional thought?  When we’re told to just wash the dishes when washing the dishes how does that affect other, necessary types of brain activity?