October 26th, 2020
We’ve all experienced times when our minds seem to wander off into a motley collection of memories, images, sounds, and ideas. Most of these experiences are directed: we deliberately choose to ignore the expected locus of attention and think about something more interesting. For example, we’re listening to a god-awful boring lecture in school, and we start thinking about what we’ll have for dinner that evening, or what we’ll be doing with our spouse, or what color to paint the wall. This isn’t wandering: it’s a purposeful trip down a mental path with a clear goal.
A better example might be something you experience while commuting to work. You’ve traveled this road hundreds of times and you are utterly bored. You’re not planning anything, but your mind wanders… to the time a baseball hit you in the face when you were a kid… or the idiotic thing you said to that alluring girl that ruined your date many years ago… or the time you scored an incredible shot in a game of street basketball. That’s your mind wandering, right?
Wrong. Remember, your mind evolved through some millions of years of intense conflict: avoiding predators, successfully predating, competing for food, mates, or social status. It did not evolve to sit around mentally twiddling its thumbs. What you think is wandering is actually much more purposeful.
Perhaps you can understand the process better by understanding the function of dreams. I refer you to my earlier essay on dreams. I believe that what we think of as “wandering” is really a small-scale daytime version of dreaming. We’re close to the mark when we call it “daydreaming”. Most of us think of daydreaming as something vaguely analogous to nighttime dreaming. In fact, daydreaming is more than analogous: it’s the same basic process, with two differences. First, it is shallower, reshuffling more trivial or easily dismissed memories. Second, we are aware of the process as it unfolds. The mental experiences that we recall are not the direct result of the reshuffling process; they are instead memories that are accidentally triggered by the reshuffling process.
I sometimes deliberately set free the daydreaming process. That is, rather than follow it consciously, I step back from it and allow it to go where it will. In normal daydreaming, we intrude into the process by focussing our conscious attention upon it. Our attention distracts and diverts the process, rather like a pedestrian who realizes that he has an audience and behaves accordingly. It takes a special kind of mental discipline to observe the process sidelong. It’s rather like averted vision, in which a stargazer observes what he’s not looking at, thereby seeing fainter objects than he can see by looking directly at them. The experience is quite different from normal daydreaming; the images and ideas rush by at a faster pace. Again, taking conscious note of them interferes with the process. One must simply let them gallop through the mind at their own pace. The goal is not to recall what happened; the goal is to let the mind clean itself out. The images and ideas are themselves meaningless; what matters is the organizational process going on behind them.
I believe that this mental exercise contributes to the clarity of my thinking. Your mind is well-tuned; allow it to cleanse itself naturally.
