When doing tasks that require little attention, people who let their minds wander show brain activity similar to sleep. This sleep-like activity has been linked to improved performance.
When people let their minds wander during tasks that require focus and active thinking, their learning and performance can suffer. However, some types of learning are more passive and demand less attention. In a study published in JNeurosci, Péter Simor and colleagues from Eötvös Loránd University investigated how mind wandering affects learning during low-attention tasks.
Nearly 40 participants took part in the study, completing a simple learning task while their brain activity was monitored. The task was intentionally designed to be easy and required no conscious effort to learn, allowing participants to pick up on patterns and probabilities without being fully aware of it.
Mind wandering while doing the task did not worsen performance, and in some cases even enhanced learning. Spontaneous mind wandering was more beneficial to learning than deliberate mind wandering.
Brain Activity and Passive Learning
During mind wandering and improvements in task learning, oscillatory neural activity in the cortex, resembling the brain activity that occurs during sleep or sleep-like states, occurred. Thus, sleep-like neural activity linked to spontaneous mind wandering promotes learning in tasks that require minimal attention.
“Most cognitive work looks at learning when you are fully engaged. But in real life, we spend so much time passively learning! As our brain needs sleep, maybe we also need passive ways of learning, or ‘wakeful rest,’ to recover from tasks that require your brain to be online and engaged,” says Simor.
Reference: “Mind wandering during implicit learning is associated with increased periodic EEG activity and improved extraction of hidden probabilistic patterns” by Péter Simor, Teodóra Vékony, Bence C. Farkas, Orsolya Szalárdy, Tamás Bogdány, Bianka Brezóczki, Gábor Csifcsák and Dezső Németh, 7 April 2025, Journal of Neuroscience.
DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1421-24.2025
Funding: Nemzeti Kutatási, Fejlesztési és Innovaciós Alap, Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale, National Brain Research Program
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3 Comments
This is because cognition has the exapted property of a key evolutionary mechanism: variation (mind wandering, zoning out, awe, wonder, scanning the problem vs. possibility space, considering differentials, etc.); and then, selection (focus, attention, relevance realization, and other recursive functions in the opponent processing of the cognizing, cognizant mind-brain apparatus, & so forth). [Vervaeke, et al; Levin, et al; and many others whom are converging upon this theory]
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.07.30.605743v1 may be of relevance, being the preprint from Jul. 2024. (And the author links do something.)
Works for me.