APA PROOFS Spontaneous Repetitive Thoughts Can Be Adaptive: Postscript on McKay and Vane (2010) Bernard J. Baars The Neurosciences Institute When researchers use the term mind wandering for task-unrelated thoughts in signal detection tasks, we may fall into the trap of believing that spontaneous thoughts are task unrelated in a deeper sense. Similar negative connotations are attached to common terms like cognitive failures, resting state, rumination, distraction, attentional failures, absent-mindedness, repetitiveness, mind lapses, going AWOL in the brain, cortical idling, and the like. Nevertheless, it seems obvious that mathematicians and scientists often engage in spontaneous repetitive thoughts and that the results of those thoughts are by no means maladaptive. Yet that seems to be implied by the standard use of common terms in the research literature. As humans, we know that spontaneous ideation goes on during all of our waking hours, during dreams and even in slow-wave sleep. It is unlikely that such a great allocation of mental resources has no useful adaptive function. This view of the spontaneous stream is consistent with the perspective of global workspace theory on conscious contents, which suggests that conscious events are not like unconscious cognitive representations. Rather, conscious events trigger widespread adaptive changes in the brain, far beyond their cortical origins. The brain evidence for such “global broadcasting” triggered by conscious (but not matched unconscious) events throughout the cortex is now quite compelling. Spontaneous conscious thoughts, even if they appear to arbitrary, irrelevant, unwanted, or intrusive, may still play an important adaptive role in life-relevant problem solving and learning. Keywords: consciousness, spontaneous thought, experience monitoring, resting state, default state What scientists expect their subjects to do may not be what those subjects end up doing. This point may be critical when researchers study spontaneous thoughts by assigning people a competing task, especially one that may be personally unimpor- tant. The spontaneous stream of thought has been studied using thought reports concurrent with signal-detection tasks, asking sub- jects for both “task-related” and “task-unrelated” thoughts (Antro- bus, 1999; Singer, 1993). Yet a tricky question emerges: When is the experimenter entitled to define task-relevance? After all, being in an experiment is only a fleeting episode in the subject’s life. When we use the term mind wandering for task-unrelated thoughts, we may be falling into the trap of believing that spon- taneous thoughts are task unrelated in a deeper sense. A similar stigma is attached to terms like cognitive failures, resting state, rumination, distraction, attentional failures, absent-mindedness, repetitiveness, mind lapses, going AWOL in the brain, cortical idling, and the like (Smallwood, O’Connor, & Sudberry, 2007; Smallwood & Schooler, 2006). Indeed, the spontaneous activity of the brain during rest breaks from an experimental task was initially called a “default” or “resting state,” when it is in fact an extremely active state and one that is plausibly in pursuance of fundamental life tasks (Dehaene & Changeux, 2005; Delamillieure et al., 2009). Are we being misled by such tendentious labels? I believe we often are. William James remarked, when he was accused of being absent-minded, that he was really just present-minded to his own thoughts (Barzun, 1983). Smallwood and Schooler (2006) made a similar point by suggesting that “mind-wandering can be seen as a goal driven process” (p. 946). Nevertheless, Christoff, Gordon, Smallwood, Smith, and Schooler (2009) wrote that “neural recruit- ment in both default and executive network regions was strongest when subjects were unaware of their own mind wandering, sug- gesting that mind wandering is most pronounced when it lacks meta-awareness” (p. 8719). The problem is that human beings are likely to be the most deeply absorbed and hence the least self- aware during the most important experiences of their lives. The absence of self-consciousness at such times may not be mind- wandering but rather, as James called it, present-mindedness to what is most important. The stream of spontaneous thought is remarkably rich and self-relevant, reflecting one’s greatest personal concerns, interper- sonal feelings, unfulfilled goals and unresolved challenges, wor- ries and hopes, inner debates, self-monitoring, feelings of know- ing, visual imagery, imaginary social interactions, recurrent beliefs, coping reactions, intrusive memories, daydreams and fan- tasies, future plans, and more—all of which are known to guide the stream of thought. Spontaneous ideation goes on during all of one’s waking hours, according to randomly timed thought- monitoring studies (Klinger, 1999; Singer & Salovey, 1999). How- ever, it continues even during sleep. All humans have 90 –120 min per night of REM dreams, which involve vivid, emotional, and dramatic experiences, judging by both brain activity and immedi- ate reports (Payne, Stickgold, Swanberg, & Kensinger, 2008). Surprisingly, even slow-wave sleep shows reportable inner speech, Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Bernard J. Baars, The Neurosciences Institute, 10640 John Jay Hopkins Drive, San Diego, CA 92121. E-mail: bbaars@nsi.edu Psychological Bulletin © 2010 American Psychological Association 2010, Vol. ●●, No. ●, 000–000 0033-2909/10/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0018726 1 tapraid5/z2r-psybul/z2r-psybul/z2r00210/z2r2182d10z xppws S=1 1/2/10 0:05 Art: 2009-0319