"Когда пытаешься что-то сделать, но погружаешься в "не имеющие отношение к делу мысли", это - блуждание мыслей.
Когда человек [физически] не спит, его мысли блуждают около 30 процентов времени. Когда едешь по прямому и пустому шоссе, мыслей блуждают до трех четвертей времени.
Люди полагают, что блуждание мыслей - это плохо, но если бы мы не могли этого делать во время выполнения скучной задачи, жизнь была бы ужасна.
У системы блуждающих мыслей есть эволюционное преимущество... Когда человек занят одной задачей, эта система поддерживает память о совокупности других задач. Она служит своего рода механизмом напоминания.
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Человек замечает некоторые из отвлечений (блуждание мыслей) благодаря механизму "метаосознавания" (“meta-awareness”), как его называет д-р Schooler"
...when you’re trying to accomplish one thing and lapse into “task-unrelated thoughts,” that’s mind wandering.
During waking hours, people’s minds seem to wander about 30 percent of the time, according to estimates by psychologists who have interrupted people throughout the day to ask what they’re thinking. If you’re driving down a straight, empty highway, your mind might be wandering three-quarters of the time, according to two of the leading researchers, Jonathan Schooler and Jonathan Smallwood of the University of California, Santa Barbara.
“People assume mind wandering is a bad thing, but if we couldn’t do it during a boring task, life would be horrible,” Dr. Smallwood says. “Imagine if you couldn’t escape mentally from a traffic jam.”
You’d be stuck contemplating the mass of idling cars, a mental exercise that is much less pleasant than dreaming about a beach and much less useful than mulling what to do once you get off the road. There’s an evolutionary advantage to the brain’s system of mind wandering, says Eric Klinger, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota and one of the pioneers of the field.
“While a person is occupied with one task, this system keeps the individual’s larger agenda fresher in mind,” Dr. Klinger writes in the “Handbook of Imagination and Mental Simulation”. “It thus serves as a kind of reminder mechanism, thereby increasing the likelihood that the other goal pursuits will remain intact and not get lost in the shuffle of pursuing many goals.”
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Yet when people sit down in a laboratory with nothing on the agenda except to read a novel and report whenever their mind wanders, in the course of a half hour they typically report one to three episodes. And those are just the lapses they themselves notice, thanks to their wandering brains being in a state of “meta-awareness,” as it’s called by Dr. Schooler,
Отсюда (The New York Times)