Letting go of the present: Mind-wandering is associated with reduced delay discounting Jonathan Smallwood ⇑ , Florence J.M. Ruby, Tania Singer Department of Social Neuroscience, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany article info Article history: Received 18 April 2012 Available online 21 November 2012 Keywords: Decision making Mind wandering Delay discounting Task unrelated thought Stimulus independent thought Self-generated thought abstract The capacity to self-generate mental content that is unrelated to the current environment is a fundamental characteristic of the mind, and the current experiment explored how this experience is related to the decisions that people make in daily life. We examined how task-unrelated thought (TUT) varies with the length of time participants are willing to wait for an economic reward, as measured using an inter-temporal discounting task. When par- ticipants performed a task requiring minimal attention, the greater the amount of time spent engaged in TUT the longer the individual was prepared to wait for an economic reward. These data indicate that self-generated thought engages processes associated with the successful management of long-term goals. Although immersion in the here and now is undeniably advantageous, under appropriate conditions the capacity to let go of the pres- ent and consider more pertinent personal goals may have its own rewards. Ó 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Almost half of waking thought involves self-generated, stimulus-independent mentation that is unrelated to events tak- ing place in the ‘‘here and now’’ (Klinger, 1978a; 1978b, Killingsworth & Gilbert, 2010) and the theoretical interpretation of such mind-wandering has become an important question in cognitive science (McVay & Kane, 2010; Smallwood, in press; Smallwood & Schooler, 2006). As we spend so much time engaged in self-generated thought, one important question is how this experience relates to the choices that people make in daily life. One line of argument suggests that during self-generated thought, consciousness becomes decoupled from perception, providing an opportunity to guide behavior using internally-represented plans and goals (Antrobus, Singer, & Greenberg, 1966; Barron, Riby, Greer, & Smallwood, 2011; Baumeister & Masicampo, 2010; Baumeister, Masicampo, & Vohs, 2011; Smallwood, Baracaia, Lowe, & Obonsawin, 2003; Smallwood, Brown, et al., 2011). Reports of task-unrelated thought (TUT) obtained during the performance of non-demanding tasks support the hypothesis that off-task thought can be a process that aids the preparation for future events: under these conditions, TUT is often future-focused, taking the form of autobiograph- ical planning (Baird, Smallwood, & Schooler, 2011, Smallwood et al., 2009, Smallwood, Schooler, et al., 2011; Smallwood et al., 2011). In similar circumstances, TUT has been implicated in creativity (Baird et al., 2012), consolidation of self- memories (Smallwood et al., 2011) and is associated with larger working memory capacity (WMC, Levinson, Smallwood, & Davidson, 2012). Mind-wandering has also been linked to poor performance on the tasks of the moment; TUT often leads to errors in com- plex tasks such as reading (McVay & Kane, 2011b; Smallwood, McSpadden, & Schooler, 2008) and is also frequent in groups of individuals who exhibit cognitive deficits under laboratory conditions (such as ADHD; Shaw & Giambra, 1993). These 1053-8100/$ - see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2012.10.007 ⇑ Corresponding author. Fax: +49 341 9940 2356. E-mail address: smallwood@cbs.mpg.de (J. Smallwood). Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 1–7 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Consciousness and Cognition journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/concog