Boy it was hard to focus on that with all the distracting ads :-)
And if you are staring at that last sentence and wondering what on earth I’m talking about, you might want to scan back a few paragraphs to find the spot where you zoned out.
This why I find audiobooks quite challenging - when the inevitable happens and I start having a tangential though (usually but not always related to what I was listening), it's hard to go back to where you were when your mind wandered. Scanning a printed page is a far superior way of recovering.
I have a relative diagnosed with ADD or ADHD. I was quite skeptical of the diagnostic process because how can we measure an attention deficit when we don't really know what normal attention is? Can we measure that?
...Alcohol tweaks mind wandering in a particularly interesting way, as Schooler and his colleagues report in a new paper entitled "Lost in the Sauce," published in Psychological Science...Drunk readers actually reported less mind wandering than sober people did. That does not mean that you should swill vodka if you want a laser focus on Tolstoy’s deathless prose, though. Schooler has shown that there are, in fact, two kinds of mind wandering: mind wandering when you are aware that you’re thinking about something else and mind wandering without awareness. He calls this second kind zoning out...
...These experiments show that we spend about 13 percent of our time zoning out. But when we are drunk, that figure doubles. In other words, inebriated subjects report less mind wandering only because they are less aware of their own minds...
...Even more telling is the discovery that zoning out may be the most fruitful type of mind wandering...
Is it just me, or did that article conclude that getting drunk doubles the time you spend thinking on big picture problems and increases your ability to solve them, although you're not aware of it and in fact may look like a total idiot when it comes to doing immediate, short-term thinking?
I know I'm overgeneralizing, but I find the connection fascinating. I know I have observed and experienced a propensity for long-term thinking after moderate consumption of alcohol. Not sure if any of of that thinking does much good though. And from reading the article, I am finding that the amount of that thinking is probably a lot more than I (or others) realize.
And if you are staring at that last sentence and wondering what on earth I’m talking about, you might want to scan back a few paragraphs to find the spot where you zoned out.
This why I find audiobooks quite challenging - when the inevitable happens and I start having a tangential though (usually but not always related to what I was listening), it's hard to go back to where you were when your mind wandered. Scanning a printed page is a far superior way of recovering.