"The Wandering Mind"

Interesting neuroscience on, among other things, "discursive" states of mind -- oddly similar to the deplorable soupy mental chaos that plays a role in the creative process of many artists we otherwise admire.

C.I: Nora Chute

Physiology and evolutionary history have bestowed upon humans a wandering mind, and meditators must then devote themselves to the seemingly impossible task of gaining control over their discursive thoughts. This paper will explore several theories of how our minds have developed a state so disparate from the ideal state of “primordial awareness”...

The forms adopted by our stream of consciousness, as discussed in the contemplative literature, are varied. Rosenberg describes the mind as a gossip, constantly “talking about others, berating itself, pointing out how it used to be better, seeing how it might improve” , while Varela, Thompson, and Rosch call the mind “a never-ending torrent of disconnected mental events” . The wandering mind not only makes it difficult to concentrate, but it also causes us to attach ourselves to certain obsessive mind states:

There is…the angry mind, which might pick up on some slight from earlier in the day and replay it endlessly. There is the mind when it has low energy, when it is dull. There is the opposite of that, the mind when it is extremely restless, can’t stop running around. There is the mind full of worry and doubt, which can’t stop questioning everything…the mind gets attached to these tendencies, which are extremely powerful and doesn’t want it to get free.

Varela, Thompson, and Roth negatively characterize our mind’s tendency to chase after thoughts. This opinion is echoed throughout the contemplative literature, mainly because perambulation takes us out of the present moment, and gets us caught up in thought activities that ultimately have little bearing on our lived experiences. Rosenberg explains that “[our mind] thinks it’s pursuing something that will have a vital effect on its life” , but when we examine the kinds of thoughts that are constantly dragging us away from the present moment, we see that we frequently obsess over similar thoughts. The fact that they continue to come up indicates that our constant thinking about these dilemmas does little to resolve them. The rewards we end up receiving never feel as good as we think they will during the stories in our heads, just as the pain we dread is never as bad. Because these thoughts lack substance, the philosophy behind meditation argues that it is “only in the present moment that we find real happiness, love, or wisdom” , and thus our lack of attentiveness and awareness to the present moment (mindfulness), leads to suffering. Buddhism calls this suffering, Dukkha, which is said to originate from the mind’s tendency to reject its natural, selfless and transient state, leading to unsatisfactoriness as we anxiously grasp for a permanence in the past and future, when we should really be focusing on the present moment.

These traditions imply that there is a habitual and seemingly uncontrollable mental activity that must be overcome through meditation. This begs the question – why do these brain states exist at all if they serve no benefit and contribute to such suffering? The theory of evolution provides one of the strongest explanations; this distraction is actually a process of evolutionary selection of strategies that helped our ancestors to survive and pass on their genes. These survival traits allowed man to mentally separate himself from the world in order to protect himself from change, to hold on to pleasures, and to scheme of ways to avoid suffering and future threats. These survival pressures are important to all creatures, but Hanson points out that we are one of the only animals with nervous systems complex enough to allow the alarms caused by these survival mechanisms “to grow into significant distress…Only we humans worry about the future, regret the past, and blame ourselves for the present.”

Humans also have a unique ability to internally simulate and represent past and hypothetical events, which we experience as a constant stream of “mini-movies.” While these mini-movies are avoided in mindfulness practice, the simulation of past events promoted survival for our ancestors, as it improved their ability to learn from past successes and mishaps by repeating neural firing patterns . These neural tendencies have been long engrained in areas of our upper-middle prefrontal cortex, in an area called “the simulator” for its ability to create these mini-movies, and now “by its very nature the simulator pulls you out of the present moment.” Our brain continues to try to help us survive by taking dynamic, changing experiences and trying “to find fixed patterns in this variable world, and to construct permanent plans for changing conditions. Consequently your brain is forever chasing after the moment that has just passed, trying to understand and control it."

Paired to a survival-driven need to maintain and replay past experiences, there is a constant grasping for stimulation that likely evolved to keep our ancestors in the business of seeking food and mates. Physiologically, this function lies in the cortical regions that support working memory, which remain stable while awareness is focused. The function works to protect this focus from the other information in your brain. But when a new stimulus, such as a sound or thought, appears, it lets this information in and updates your awareness to include this new sense. If the contents of working memory are stimulated enough, there is a constant stream of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that triggers the positive feelings one gets from rewards and builds connections that keep us pursuing dopamine producing activities. Remaining stimulated is an activity that keeps pursuing dopamine. Thus, when stimulation drops, dopamine drops and the working memory instantly seeks further stimulation. So as we meditate, drive, or listen to a story, and dopamine levels drop, our mind’s solution is to get lost in thought in an attempt to increase the stimulation level.

These vestigial mental processes are made worse, Hanson argues, by our Western culture, which takes our already stimulation-seeking brains, and overwhelms them with a constant stream of information. We are constantly receiving sensory stimulation from television, radio, billboards and our busy lives. This habituates our brain to very high levels of stimulation. Any drop in this constant stream therefore cues our mind to produce stimulating thoughts much more easily than it would have for our ancestors living in a simpler time.

Another central aspect of our wandering mind is its relationship to our perceived sense of self, as our self-conscious obsessions make up a large part of our mental fixations and lead us to further suffering. A major teaching of both Buddhist and Daoist traditions is that any conception we have of ourselves as independent beings does not exist in reality; “most of us are convinced of our identities,” explain Varela, Thompson, and Rosch:

We have a personality, memories and recollections, and plans and anticipations, which seem to come together in a coherent point of view, a center from which we survey the world, the ground on which we stand…[yet] no tradition has ever claimed to discover an independent, fixed, or unitary self within the world of experience.

Rather, our understanding that the world and our experiences will never exist independently, that they are constantly co-creating one another, leads us to the conclusion that there is no constant self that is maintained from moment to moment; everything is in constant flux as our worlds are co-originated from one moment to the next. However, our mind’s tendency to simulate constant streams of self-conscious thoughts about our pasts and futures, encourages us to view ourselves as independent beings, leading us to “lose touch with one’s most basic sensibilities and deepest promptings.”

Furthermore, it’s the constant activation of the brain regions responsible for this self-conscious outlook that so often drive our grasping minds into discursive thought. The dorsal pulvinar, the lateral posterior nucleus, and the limbic nuclei are hypothesized to be the neural correlates to our self-centeredness, often interacting with the medial frontal and parietal regions of the cortex. These areas are called the journaling centers of the brain, “where we built, stored, owned, and continue to update the semi-fictional realities of our own life story.” These cortical areas have been shown through EEG and fMRI to have incredibly high resting activity and metabolism, and these consistently active networks are responsible for much of our mind wandering, which, “stirred up by habit energies and emotions from subconscious limbic levels…contaminate our meditation.” However, this network is deactivated during tasks that require focused attention, suggesting that using meditation to train our attention is the way to free ourselves from disruptive, discursive, and self-centered thoughts, which give us an erroneous belief in an independent existence, and lead us to constantly and pointlessly grasp for understanding in an impermanent world.

Hanson Rick. Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom. New Harbinger, 2009. ISBN-13: 978-1-57224-695-9.

Varela, Francisco, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.