What good is a mind that wanders?

For decades, researchers have demonstrated the shortcomings of our attention, but distraction may be essential to modern life.

Grim pronouncements from the popular press in the past decade have declared us to be living in a new “age of distraction.” At the same time, a range of academic studies have estimated that we spend anywhere from 20 to 50 percent of our day focused on something other than the task immediately at hand, with some placing the economic cost of distraction at several hundred billion dollars per year.

The issue has spawned a cottage industry of management gurus promising to help us stay focused and be more efficient, and a litany of research demonstrating our brains’ shortcomings. But according to Malia Mason, they may be missing the point. “There’s a tendency for both self-help professionals and researchers to focus on the ways in which people mismanage their attention. We begin tasks and then can’t remember why we started them. We get distracted. Our minds wander,” she explains. “But, at a certain point, simply documenting these shortcomings ceases to be productive. Instead, why not try to figure out what our brains are trying to do, and if there isn’t some value in the way they interact with the world?”

To the extent that distraction is a new economic concern, for Mason it’s critical that we consider the way work has changed. With more than 80 percent of the US workforce now employed in the tertiary sector, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and that figure only set to rise, Mason points out that “our work is less structured now. We have to make choices about what to do, when to do it, how much attention to devote to it, and when to shift our attention to any of the innumerable other tasks clamoring for mindshare. What people often fail to appreciate is that a lot of our work has to happen in fits and starts; we can’t do it all in one sitting.” That observation indicates one of the potential benefits of self-distraction — it can remind us of tasks we still have to finish.

“We get frustrated when we forget to do something, but we’re also frustrated with ourselves for any self-reminders that happen when we can’t immediately act on those needs. It’s an unrealistically high standard.”

When people’s minds wander, Mason finds, they tend to travel to unresolved issues and uncompleted tasks. “You never find that people are, say, on a conference call and start thinking about the tube of toothpaste they bought yesterday. Once you’ve done it, it’s gone,” she says. But when a need remains outstanding, even if there’s nothing you can do about it in the moment, she finds “it exerts a gravitational pull on your attention. You suddenly catch yourself thinking about that tube of toothpaste you need instead of the call.” Importantly, Mason and a collaborator have found that the likelihood that you actually remember to do that task in the future increases considerably if your mind wanders to it in inopportune moments. “This suggests there is a mnemonic upside to having a mind with a habit of distracting itself,” she explains.

“It’s a funny thing,” she continues. “We get frustrated when we forget to do something, but we’re also frustrated with ourselves for any self-reminders that happen when we can’t immediately act on those needs. It’s an unrealistically high standard.”

Mind wandering may have further benefits as well, allowing us to make use of otherwise unproductive time, like waiting in line, when less than our full attention is demanded. As Mason indicates, this “distraction” may actually “allow us to engage in the world, while working through other tasks.” The perceived unproductiveness of mind wandering may further allow us to hit on creative solutions to complex problems. “It’s hard to prove,” she says, “but I’m a fan of this idea that when your mind wanders to a big problem, because you’re not intentionally trying to solve it, you might be more likely to hit on a different entry point to it, and that can open up new solutions.”

Without falling into the trap of seeing our brains as perfect, she argues, “it’s not the worst thing in the world that we have a brain that tries to help us remember the things we told it we care about.” Indeed, rather than viewing our wandering minds as fundamentally unproductive, we might instead see them as efficiently allocating a scarce resource. “Attention isn’t like other resources,” Mason asserts. “It’s not like money; you can’t save it. You use it, or it’s gone. What I want to figure out is how to help people use it better.”

Malia Mason is the Gantcher Associate Professor of Business in the Management Division. Her research focuses on two areas: negotiations, social judgment, and decision-making, and the regulation of attention.