Mind wandering is an intriguing phenomenon—the average person spends up to 50% of their waking hours in this semi-dreamlike state. While it is notorious for undermining performance on tasks requiring focused, sustained attention, acting as an attractor for distraction, mind wandering has also been associated with better performance in some areas. Notably, the wandering mind offers benefits for creativity and certain types of problem-solving, as the high cognitive control required to focus on demanding tasks can leave other, more free-form states of mind out of luck.
The Wandering Earth
It is well-known that one solution for analysis paralysis—getting stuck in rigid approaches and finding oneself blocked—is to take a walk, listen to music, or otherwise allow oneself to daydream. This shakes things up, introducing some randomness, some noise or “stochasticity,” into canalized mental processes and nudging us out of well-trodden ruts.
Given the odd ways in which mind wandering can both gum up and lubricate our efforts on different types of tasks, a recent study in The Journal of Neuroscience (Simor et al., 2025) investigating the impact of mind wandering on probabilistic learning is particularly interesting. Probabilistic or statistical learning involves picking up on connections and noticing patterns within streams of complex information. This process happens outside of awareness, unintentionally, and is not under conscious control—except perhaps by getting out of one’s own way.
Daydreaming in the Lab
In this study, researchers recruited 37 participants and asked them to complete multiple trials of the attention-demanding Alternating Serial Reaction Time (ASRT) task, which required them to press a keyboard key corresponding to the direction of a target shown on the screen. For example, if an arrow pointed to the right, they would click the corresponding key. During the approximately 30 ASRT trials, participants wore EEG caps to track brainwave activity. The trials were set up so that researchers could measure both probabilistic learning and visuomotor performance, based on how the stimuli were presented. After each trial, participants were assessed for their level of mind wandering with regard to perceptions, thoughts, or memories unrelated to the ASRT task. What were they thinking about, if anything? Was their mind blank? How much did their mind wander from the task? And so on.
On a basic level, the results showed that mind wandering varied greatly from person to person, and across the course of the trials for any given individual. Unsurprisingly, mind wandering increased toward the end of the task.
What We Learned
In terms of specific outcomes, statistical analysis showed that probabilistic learning was enhanced during mind wandering, but mind wandering interfered with visuomotor performance. Mind wandering not only failed to disrupt probabilistic learning, but it actually enhanced the capacity to unintentionally pick up on patterns in the fast-paced flow of data during a resource-demanding task. This was true across the whole sample, even after accounting for individual differences.
Furthermore, during mind wandering, EEG-derived brainwave activity on the surface of the brain showed slow and delta wave frequencies, reminiscent of sleep-like states. In addition, mind wandering was more effective at enhancing probabilistic learning when it was spontaneous rather than deliberately induced—a finding that may have important implications for how best to make use of this curious state of mind.
Implications
This study is in line with prior work showing the selective benefits of mind wandering. Significantly, mind wandering was beneficial to probabilistic learning regardless of individual variation, suggesting it is a general feature of how people think. The similarity with sleeping brainwave activity also implies that learning during sleep may track with mind wandering, supporting unintentional connection-making based on probabilistic learning. We know that sleep is important for learning, among other things, and part of how dreaming works in this regard may be related to how the brain responds to noisy, disorganized activity, which may evoke more efficient pattern recognition during sleep. It may be that our recall of dreams upon waking is reflective of conscious activity making sense of less organized activity, in line with Freudian ideas of raw “primary” process in dreams, and narrative, sense-making “secondary” revision or process when dreams are reflected upon, written down, and actively analyzed.
Those seeking to leverage mind wandering for this kind of learning may benefit most when such meandering occurs naturally and spontaneously, based on the findings above. Trying to force the mind to wander is less likely to work as well. However, creating circumstances in which the mind is prone to wander unintentionally may allow for a semi-intentional cultivation of this fruitful state of mind. Those with ADHD and related experiences of increased mind wandering may find this work of particular interest, given the tendency to mind-wander more often, including the connection with creativity, probabilistic information processing, and certain types of enhanced problem-solving. Those who refuse to let their mind wander can enjoy the benefits of high cognitive control, but might also consider whether relaxing their grip a bit could be beneficial.
Working out when to let the mind wander, when to buckle down and exert conscious control, and how to flexibly move between these states of mind holds promise for optimizing performance. This has implications for how brain networks—including the default mode network, central executive network, and salience network—interplay to produce a coherent and integrated sense of self over time.
Attention Essential Reads
And finally, there are implications for psychotherapy, particularly psychoanalytic therapy, where human development crucially depends on the ability to dream—not only literally, in the sense of nocturnal dreams, but also in the sense of dreaming as a form of experience, meaning-making, learning, reverie, free-association, and reflection upon these processes. In the words of psychoanalyst Thomas H. Ogden, known for his work on “talking-as-dreaming”:
In the course of participating in dreaming the patient’s undreamt and interrupted dreams, the analyst gets to know the patient in a way and at a depth that may allow him to say something that is true to the conscious and unconscious emotional experience that is occurring in the analytic relationship at that moment.
