A person’s mind will wander at least 30% of the time during all activities except one

A person’s mind will wander at least 30% of the time during all activities except one, say graduate student Matthew Killingsworth and psychologist Daniel Gilbert, both of Harvard University.

The one activity that could keep a person’s mind from wondering – making love – where the frequency of mind-wandering drop below 30%.

Killingsworth and Gilbert based their results on 250,000 data points on the thoughts, feelings, and actions of 2,250 people as they went about their daily lives – all collected via an iphone app called “Track Your Happiness”. Participants agreed to be contacted randomly throughout the day, at which point they selected what they were doing from a menu, whether they were actually thinking about it, and how happy or sad they felt. Volunteers had 22 general activities from which to choose, including walking, shopping, eating, exercising, watching television, and having sex.

The human mind is uniquely capable of wandering — that is, to ponder things that have happened, to anticipate things that will happen, and to plan for things that might happen.

Overall, the participants were less happy when their minds were wandering than when they were paying attention to the activity they were doing. The direction in which the mind ran off was also determined to be unrelated to the person’s current situation and did not lift his or her mood, even when thinking about pleasant things. In other words, when people were doing fun things, their minds didn’t necessarily go to pleasant places, nor did people seem to be able to escape unpleasant tasks by drifting into a better mental spot.