There Isn't Very Much That Gets Your Undivided Attention... And That May Be A Good Thing
from the wandering-minds dept
In this age of what's been called "continuous partial attention" and the increasing tendency of people to multitask, rather than just focus on one thing, researchers are starting to dig into why the brain tends to wander so much. It's not the easiest thing to study, because it's one of those things that the more you try to pay attention to it, the more you're likely to impact the results -- but there's been some research done where people are asked what they're thinking about at random times, and it suggests that we're pretty naturally wired to have wandering minds. Of course, this should be common sense, but it still seems to cause trouble at companies where management feels that it's "bad" for anyone to ever focus on anything but work. The simple fact is that you can't be "on" all the time, and your attention is going to wander, no matter what you're doing. In fact, some studies have shown that giving people a chance to let their minds wander can actually be quite good for productivity. In fact, the research discussed in the article above suggests that mind wandering is actually how the brain tries to increase productivity, by making use of "spare cycles" to continually work on random problems even when it's not the immediate focus. The fact that the wandering sometimes is unproductive is simply a natural side-effect of that. Basically, it's a recognition that not everything we're doing requires full attention -- and perhaps "continuous partial attention" is how are brains were originally wired for some very good reasons.
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