THE WANDERING MIND
"Whenever you notice your mind wandering," a fundamental in struction in meditation advises, "bring your mind back to its point of focus." The operative phrase here is wf? enever you notice. As our mind drifts off, we almost never notice the moment it launches into some other orbit on its own. A meander away from the focus of meditation can last seconds, minutes, or the entire session before we notice, if we do at all.
That simple challenge is so hard because the very brain circuits we need to catch our mind as it wanders are recruited into the neu ral web that sets the mind adrift in the first place.8 What are they doing? Apparently, managing the random bits that fill a wandering mind into a detailed train of thought, like How do I pay my bills? Such thoughts require cooperation between the mind's drifting circuitry and the organizational talents of the executive circuits.
Catching a wandering mind in the act is elusive; more often than not when we are lost in t ought we fail to realize that our mind has wandered in the first place. Noticing that our mind has wandered marks a shift in brain activity; the greater this meta awareness, the weaker the mind wandering becomes.10 Brain imag ing reveals that at the moment we catch our mind adrift that act of meta-awareness lessens the activity of the executive and medial circuits, but it does not completely suppress them.U
Modern life values sitting in school or an office, focusing on one thing at a time-an attentional stance that may not always have paid off in early human history. Survival in the wild, some neuro scientists argue, may have depended at crucial moments on a rap idly shifting attention and swift action, without hesitating to think what to do. What we now diagnose as an attentional deficit may reflect a natural variation in focusing styles that had advantages in evolution-and so continues to be dispersed in our gene pool.