Abstract
Our lives are filled with an endless array of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings, and our attention usually darts back and forth between them. Yet meditative traditions have long valued the capacity to remain undistracted from our immediate experience, and countless individuals make a practice of stabilizing their awareness in the here and now. What are the implications of anchoring our usually restless minds? Could stabilizing our attention provide an informative lens into the dynamics of the human brain? Here we review recent research that situates mindfulness as an opposing construct to mind-wandering and a remedy for wandering minds. We then review empirical intersections between mindfulness and mind-wandering from recent neuroimaging studies.
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Notes
- 1.
It is worth noting that this definition of non-distraction always exists with reference to a particular activity. For example, if your goal is to engage in a task, but instead you become deeply focused on off-task concerns, this would not be an example of mindfulness even though your off-task focus may be undistracted.
- 2.
Our selection of non-distraction as a central feature of mindfulness strongly influences our interpretation of the opposing nature of mindfulness and mind-wandering. More inclusive conceptualizations of mindfulness might lead to different perspectives. For instance, although there may be wide agreement that episodes of mind-wandering are not instances of mindfulness, the absence of mind-wandering may not guarantee the presence of mindfulness. One might be undistracted, but lack other qualities sometimes espoused to be essential to mindfulness (non-judgment, openness, curiosity, etc.).
- 3.
One could argue that a genuine instance of mindfulness must be characterized by the presence of non-distraction, non-judgment, curiosity, and openness, and therefore, that investigations pertaining to a single quality of mindfulness will be insufficient in their ability to draw conclusions about the construct in its totality. Although more focused research into specific features of mindfulness risks not fully representing the more inclusive characterizations of the construct, they do allow for more tractable empirical investigations. It is considerably more feasible to operationally define and measure non-distraction than it would be to integrate measurements of curiosity, openness, non-judgment, awareness, and non-distraction to ensure that all these elements are present simultaneously.
- 4.
Focused-attention meditation may not represent an instance of mindfulness within multi-factor frameworks of mindfulness that would require the presence of some constellation of additional qualities besides non-distraction.
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Acknowledgments
MDM and JWS are supported through United States Department of Education grant R305A110277 awarded to JWS. BWM is supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under grant No. DGE-1144085. The content of this article does not necessarily reflect the position or policy of the U. S. Government, and no official endorsement should be inferred.
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Mrazek, M.D., Mooneyham, B.W., Schooler, J.W. (2014). Insights from Quiet Minds: The Converging Fields of Mindfulness and Mind-Wandering. In: Schmidt, S., Walach, H. (eds) Meditation – Neuroscientific Approaches and Philosophical Implications. Studies in Neuroscience, Consciousness and Spirituality, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01634-4_13
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