
Stop Paying Attention: Zoning Out Is a Crucial Mental State - robg
http://discovermagazine.com/2009/jul-aug/15-brain-stop-paying-attention-zoning-out-crucial-mental-state
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frossie
Boy it was hard to focus on that with all the distracting ads :-)

 _And if you are staring at that last sentence and wondering what on earth I’m
talking about, you might want to scan back a few paragraphs to find the spot
where you zoned out._

This why I find audiobooks quite challenging - when the inevitable happens and
I start having a tangential though (usually but not always related to what I
was listening), it's hard to go back to where you were when your mind
wandered. Scanning a printed page is a far superior way of recovering.

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wglb
I have a relative diagnosed with ADD or ADHD. I was quite skeptical of the
diagnostic process because how can we measure an attention deficit when we
don't really know what normal attention is? Can we measure that?

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DanielBMarkham
_...Alcohol tweaks mind wandering in a particularly interesting way, as
Schooler and his colleagues report in a new paper entitled "Lost in the
Sauce," published in Psychological Science...Drunk readers actually reported
less mind wandering than sober people did. That does not mean that you should
swill vodka if you want a laser focus on Tolstoy’s deathless prose, though.
Schooler has shown that there are, in fact, two kinds of mind wandering: mind
wandering when you are aware that you’re thinking about something else and
mind wandering without awareness. He calls this second kind zoning out...

...These experiments show that we spend about 13 percent of our time zoning
out. But when we are drunk, that figure doubles. In other words, inebriated
subjects report less mind wandering only because they are less aware of their
own minds...

...Even more telling is the discovery that zoning out may be the most fruitful
type of mind wandering..._

Is it just me, or did that article conclude that getting drunk doubles the
time you spend thinking on big picture problems and increases your ability to
solve them, although you're not aware of it and in fact may look like a total
idiot when it comes to doing immediate, short-term thinking?

I know I'm overgeneralizing, but I find the connection fascinating. I know I
have observed and experienced a propensity for long-term thinking after
moderate consumption of alcohol. Not sure if any of of that thinking does much
good though. And from reading the article, I am finding that the amount of
that thinking is probably a lot more than I (or others) realize.

