philinq IV, 2-2016, pp. R1-5 ISSN (print) 2281-8618-ETS Michael C. Corballis The Wandering Mind What the Brain Does When You are Not Looking The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2015, pp. 184 It is commonplace to consider mind-wandering as a secondary, useless ac- tivity of our mind to which we guiltily abandon ourselves for laziness or dis- traction. The aim of the book is to show that, far from being the slaves of a blamable indolence, every time we are absent-minded or lost in thought, we are involved in an essential mental activity. Not only is mind-wandering a funda- mental component of our life (whether we want it or not, our mind meanders at night and for half the time during the day), but it also has a constructive and adaptive function that is crucial for facing the contingencies of a complex world. Without a wandering mind we would be stuck in the present, unable to invent stories and to escape the here and now through mental time travel. Mind-wandering takes us into unexplored regions of the unconscious mind that are inaccessible to the conscious will. Not only does this capacity allows us to build and consolidate the sense of our personality but it also helps to multiply our self into imagined possible selves and to expand the range of our experience. Creativity, too, lies in the randomness of mind-wandering, which makes possible unpredictable connections of ideas. The book therefore takes into account different forms of mind-wandering. Mental traveling depends on memory, which provides the material that feeds our imagination. Memory is so important to mind-wandering that some syn- dromes, such as amnesia and hyperthymesia, can impair the ability to mind- travel. While the amnesic mind, having no access to the past, has nothing to nourish its mental meandering (as the author says, it has ‘lost the luxury of nostalgia’, p. 24), a mind that remembers everything, on the other hand, is un- able to see relations, to make connections and to form abstractions. A mind of this kind (which reminds us of Borges’s famous character, Funes) can not only never indulge in distraction, but is also incapable of delving into a wandering mental activity as simple as reading a novel, as each situation is conceived in such precise details that it’s impossible to make sense of the totality. In other words, for mind-wandering, remembering is as important as for- getfulness. Mental time travels into the past and future are possible precisely