Zoning Out Is A "Crucial" Mental State

Daydreaming on the Job?: istockphoto

Whew! I thought that it was only me that became more productive when I wasn't under the microscopic and unrelenting eye of the GTD Productivity Jedi.

When our minds wander, we lose touch with the outside world. We don't actually black out, of course, but we are more likely to make mistakes, fail to encode memories, or miss a connection. Zoning out makes us particularly prone to these errors. Schooler and Smallwood, along with Merrill McSpadden of the University of British Columbia, tested the effect of zoning out by having a test group read a Sherlock Holmes mystery in which a villain used a pseudonym. As people were reading the passages discussing this fact, the researchers checked their state of attentiveness. Just 30 percent of the people who were zoning out at the key moments could give the villain's pseudonym, while 61 percent of the people who weren't zoning out at those moments succeeded.

These results are shocking when you stop to think about them. Each of us has a magnificent hive of billions of neurons in our head, joined to each other by trillions of connections. The human brain is arguably the most complex organ in the natural world. And yet studies on mind wandering are showing that we find it difficult to stay focused for more than a few minutes on even the easiest tasks, despite the fact that we make mistakes whenever we drift away.

The Brain: Stop Paying Attention: Zoning Out Is A Crucial Mental State [Discover Magazine]

PopSci has an article that says we make more mistakes when we are not focused...

We probably didn't need a formalized brain study to tell us that we zone out during repetitive and/or monotonous tasks and that mistakes are more commonly made when we do. That much we've figured out for ourselves. Fortunately, though, the study by scientists at the University of Bergen in Norway and Southampton University in the UK discovered something else about those times when we space. By scanning subjects with fMRI while having them participate in a series of tasks in which they were asked to respond to visual cues, the researchers found that they could anticipate when the subjects would make mistakes based on their changing brain activity.

http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2008-04/spacing-out-and-slipping [Popular Science]