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37| Mind-Wandering — Kalina Christoff Hadjiilieva on the Science of Spontaneous Thought
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Mind-wandering is often dismissed as a distraction, an idle drift away from productive thought. But what if this spontaneous movement of the mind is not just a quirk of cognition but a fundamental feature of how we think, create, and find meaning?
Our guest, Kalina Christoff Hadjiilieva, is a Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia where she leads The Cognitive Neuroscience of Thought Laboratory. Her work explores the neural mechanisms behind mind-wandering, uncovering how our brains shift between goal-directed focus and free-flowing exploration.
Kalina argues that mind-wandering is not a failure of attention but an essential cognitive process—one that fuels creativity, problem-solving, and insight. While some scientists define mind-wandering narrowly as thinking about anything other than the task at hand, she proposes a broader, more dynamic definition: mind-wandering is thought moving freely, unconstrained by immediate demands or rigid patterns.
Neuroscience has long favored studying controlled, deliberate cognition. The executive brain functions—the ones we can track, measure, and influence—are often given priority. But Kalina points out that the vast majority of brain activity is spontaneous and unexplained. She advocates for a shift in perspective: instead of treating free thought as noise, we should recognize its role in structuring our experiences, shaping our beliefs, and allowing us to make sense of the world.
Mind-wandering, Kalina suggests, is not just about distraction—it is about discovery.
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Transcript
Introduction to Multiverses Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
I'm James Robinson. You're listening to Multiverses.
Epiphanies and Spontaneous Inspiration
00:00:04
Speaker
Nikola Tesla was walking through a park in Budapest when the idea of the AC motor came to him. Henri Poincare was on holiday in Cannes and he was just stepping onto a bus when a problem that he'd been struggling with for for months ah suddenly resolved itself. He had this insight that was really key to his career, in fact, and to modern mathematics. It seems so often that these These moments of inspiration come unbidden. You can't chase after them by sitting brows furrowed at your desk.
Exploring Creative Thought Processes
00:00:37
Speaker
I guess this week is Kalina Christoph Hadiyeva, professor at the University of British Columbia, and her work focuses on this question of the state that our brain needs to be in for us to have these spontaneous thoughts, these creative and inspired thoughts.
00:00:54
Speaker
In fact, she leads the Cognitive Neuroscience of Thought Laboratory in BC, um which brings the techniques of modern science to this question, ah using neural imaging, for example, to understand the physiological state of our brains when our minds are wandering.
00:01:12
Speaker
One really important thing that Kalina and her colleagues identify is that there are two dimensions of constraints, which one can see as as as sort of inhibiting or um limiting our thoughts. So there are deliberate constraints, um which might be, for example, ah when one is purposefully thinking about a particular problem.
00:01:36
Speaker
But there are also automatic constraints, which is where your mind keeps pulling you back to think about a particular ah topic or thing. And I think this this kind of two-dimensional landscape is really useful for understanding our you know what kind of state one is in.
Impact of Psychedelics on Thought Constraints
00:01:53
Speaker
For example, in a psychedelic induced state, you might be right at the origin with very little automatic and very little deliberate constraints, which could be good perhaps for generating lots of ideas, but it may be very bad for evaluating them.
00:02:07
Speaker
you like You might need to skip to a slightly more deliberate state to be able to test if those ideas are good or bad or you know should be rejected out of hand. and so Sometimes you need to be with your you know sort of borderline between a constrained and deliberate place of thinking and portray between a place of mind wandering as well.
The Role of Diverse Ideas in Creativity
00:02:33
Speaker
So I think this is just a wonderful and useful conversation. Maybe the upshot is that we should spend more time in and and parks in Budapest or on on holiday in France, I'm not sure. I think you do have to do the work. You need the ideas in your mind to make these connections between very diverse ideas. um But yes, I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope you do too.
Understanding Mind Wandering
00:03:04
Speaker
Hi, Alina, Kristoff, I'm really looking forward to our conversation, um which I hope will wander over many topics. and So it seems appropriate to start with mind wandering, which I know is something you've looked into and and in a lot of detail. um Can you tell us what mind wandering is?
00:03:26
Speaker
Yes, for sure. First of all, thanks for having me, James, on the podcast. Mind wandering is a great point to start. um And surprisingly, the answer to what mind wandering is, is not very easy. Partly because um it's become quite a big topic of study in the last, I would say, 15 to a little over 15 years.
00:03:49
Speaker
And for scientists, mind wandering is one thing, but for people outside of science, it's something different. And actually, even if you look across people, whether it's within science or outside of science, you would find very different intuitions about what mind wandering is. So I'll give you my scientific intuition, which is informed by my personal intuition,
00:04:12
Speaker
ah about what mind wandering is. And that also happens to be what has shaped my work on mind wandering. um So for me, mind wandering is a way in which thought moves or changes over time. And that way tends to be free. So but instead of moving in a very um channeled way, or in a very constrained and predictable way, it moves freely. And you don't necessarily know where your thought is going to take you to.
00:04:42
Speaker
um And that intuition actually is based in a very um ah fundamental understanding of what the the word wandering means in English language. Incidentally, there's a lot of linguistic differences across different cultures as to whether they have a term like mind wandering or not.
00:04:59
Speaker
and what it what it means and we don't actually necessarily understand them. So right now we're just basing our discussion on the English language.
Contrasts: Mind Wandering vs. Rumination
00:05:07
Speaker
And if you take the verb to wander in English, what you'll find from a dictionary or from just your own understanding is that when we wander in space, what we usually do is we move about that space in some way that isn't led by a goal or by an end state.
00:05:25
Speaker
So if I'm visiting Rome, like some years ago, I visited Rome and I wandered to a square where I bought this painting right behind me. um i'm not If I'm wandering around Rome, let's say, I'm not headed to the Colosseum and I have to get there in half an hour, right? Or i'm not I don't have a specific goal that I'm trying to achieve by that movement.
00:05:47
Speaker
and um That is a form of, if you like, exploring a space, or if you like, just walking around and seeing what happens. So there's some openness, this freedom to that movement in space that the verb wander connotes or suggests. So for me, my wandering is simply a metaphor for what the mind does.
00:06:08
Speaker
when we are thinking in a certain way, just like our bodies move when they wander, they're moving in a certain way. When the mind changes from one mental state to the next, effectively it feels like there's a movement going on because we're going from one mental space to another mental space, from one concept to another, or from one memory to another.
00:06:28
Speaker
And the manner of that change over time in mental state is, for me, what mind wandering refers to. So instead of defining mind wandering in terms of what I'm thinking about, the way I define mind wandering scientifically is in terms of the, if you like, the experience of that ah change from one mental state to another. And whether it has a relative freedom to it, there's no absolute freedom in the mind, just like there's no absolute freedom in life.
00:06:57
Speaker
But there's a relative freedom that we can experience, which is greater than the freedom I might have if I'm ruminating, for example. So when I'm ruminating, I oftentimes don't have very much freedom over what I'm going to think about next. In fact,
00:07:11
Speaker
um When rumination happens, people are feeling oftentimes stuck in ruts, in mental ruts, or and they want to stop thinking about what they're thinking, but they can't. So there's actually a lack of freedom there in where the mind goes. what So for me, rumination is in fact the opposite of mind-wandering. So that's my scientific approach to mind-wandering, but that's not necessarily the majority of scientists' take on mind-wandering.
00:07:40
Speaker
um A lot of people who study mind wandering, not necessarily um um from the perspective of mind wandering, but they just want to put a mind wandering measure in their study. theyre Let's say they're studying education or they're studying ah depression and they just want to put a measure of mind wandering. Oftentimes they take a definition which is very expeditious, but I believe scientifically very narrow, of ah thinking about something other than what you're currently doing.
00:08:09
Speaker
So if I ask you right now, were you thinking about the podcast, the recording, or were you thinking about something else? um You might say, yes, I'm thinking about what I'm currently doing, or no, I'm not. And if you say no, I wasn't thinking about what I'm currently doing,
00:08:25
Speaker
then um we would classify that as mind wandering or a lot of researchers who study mind wandering that way would classify it. For me that's actually not a very informative question because just knowing whether you're currently thinking about what you're doing or not doesn't really give me any information about how the how your mental states were changing over time.
00:08:45
Speaker
And while if we're studying mind laundering, for me that is the first crucial question we should know, whether your mental states were evolving from one end to the other with a relative degree of freedom in how they can change, or whether they were stuck on a track that constrained them for various for various reasons.
00:09:06
Speaker
as That's interesting, yeah. I can see the relation between the two, how this kind of task-unrelated nature of some thoughts might be the entry point to
Scientific Bias and Spontaneous Thought
00:09:18
Speaker
mind wandering. If your thoughts are centred on some particular task, then you can't mind wander.
00:09:24
Speaker
It doesn't, it seems like a necessary but kind of insufficient um definition of what mind wandering is. Like you might just, your thoughts might just slip away for one moment um and then come back to the task quite quickly and um at least by the a kind of folk definition ah of mind wandering, that doesn't really fit the bill. So yeah i yeah, I find that really interesting. And it's also interesting, I guess you mentioned that um Perhaps that's the easy way of defining mind-wandering for a lot of purposes, um just so you can tick a box and say, okay, they won't think about the task, they would do it therefore they were doing this. um And I wonder if that relates to just the tradition within psychology and cognitive science to
00:10:13
Speaker
prioritise research into what people are doing actively and um maybe not see mind wandering as so worthy of study because it's not a not seen as a productive enterprise, perhaps. um So it's maybe been the underdog, I suppose, in terms of what gets attention from psychologists and cognitive scientists.
00:10:40
Speaker
Yes, you're absolutely right. There's definitely that trend. So um you said a key word, which actually I want to come back to. You said there's a bias perhaps in the sciences to focus on what we're doing actively.
00:10:54
Speaker
And I actually want to unpack that word because it's really important. So oftentimes, actually, the word active is being taken in a biased way itself, just like the word mind wandering is taken in a biased way. The word active actually is being defined in a biased way in scientific circles to mean deliberate intentional activity.
00:11:19
Speaker
Right. And that's actually one of the things that I'm really interested in. I think when we are spontaneous, oftentimes we can be very active, right? I can be improvising on an instrument while playing at some jazz jam and I can be very active, but I'm not 100% deliberate about what I do.
00:11:38
Speaker
um Or my my favorite example from giving birth to my kids, I could be giving birth to a child with my uterus, which is an organ that I don't control. It's a muscle of my body that I don't control. And that muscle can be very active. ah Same thing with digestion, right? Like we're digesting all they justing food all the time, but we're not intentionally acting.
00:12:02
Speaker
to to make it digested, but there is an action happening in our body through a smooth muscle function that's doing a lot of things. But oftentimes in psychology and and a lot of science when we say active thinking, we actually mean intentional, deliberate, goal-directed thinking.
00:12:21
Speaker
But if you actually go back to the word itself, active, nothing in active inactive suggests that it must be deliberate or intentional, um because active just means that there's some action going on. And um I think what happens is spontaneous thought, which is my big topic of investigation and mind wandering specifically, which for me is a ah form of spontaneous thought.
00:12:43
Speaker
is that there's a lot of action happening in our mind. We're actually being very active, but we're not in control of where the mind is going to go. And so there's actually a confusion that happens conceptually in science, which I think is very detrimental to our understanding of the mind.
00:13:00
Speaker
between active and controlled. And so there's actually a lot of activity happening in the mind and in the brain that we don't control and yet we're completely putting it in a kind of a black hole of that's impossible to study and therefore it doesn't exist. um So if you look at the brain activity of individual, like even if you scan the brain using fMRI of any person,
00:13:24
Speaker
we can only explain or control through experimental tasks or instructions to subjects at most 1% of their brain activity. Wow. Almost everything in the brain that we record is actually, we can't even explain why it's happening. We think it's like spontaneous activity happening. Our tasks, the best tasks that we can get to control the brain activation ah tend to be usually perceptual tasks like a vision experiment,
00:13:54
Speaker
at most we get 1% signal change and that's a very big magnitude of effect to get in your imaging and there's actually some research going on now that I find fascinating looking at the percent of unexplained activity going on and changes in the brain that for scientists, we just push it aside because we're not in control of that activity. And therefore, it becomes no longer an interesting subject for investigation.
Unveiling the Default Mode Network
00:14:23
Speaker
But what I've been trying to do and some other people are doing is actually try to develop new scientific methods where we could investigate things like spontaneous thought, even though as scientists, we don't control it, we can still observe it when it happens.
00:14:36
Speaker
And I think that's really important for understanding the vast majority of our mental experience, um which is not necessarily deliberate control during intentional.
00:14:49
Speaker
yeah Yeah, you're right to call me out on that. like there There is this conflation of active um and deliberate, and also perhaps productive as well, which is another word I mentioned, but all those three things can and come apart. And I like how you mentioned, I wasn't aware that so much of our brain activity is just not understood. um And that makes, yeah, I mean, that's just a wonderful source of mystery. um I've heard you mention how in the past, mind wandering and task unrelated thought more generally perhaps were just seen as as noise. um But actually, there's a lot more structure there, as you mentioned, like it's it's not just that it's something that um
00:15:34
Speaker
is completely and random. There's very particular areas of the brain which are are lighting up. And so we can kind of understand, well, this this has some features that that are distinctive. um And um yeah, it's not random electrical activations. um Maybe if you can mention those a little.
00:15:54
Speaker
Yeah, that's that's a ah good direction to get into as well. So um until the late 1990s, basically neuroscientists, neuroimagers like myself, I was in graduate school at the time, um we were using something called REST um as a baseline condition. So REST was basically we put people in the scanner and we give them no tasks to do.
00:16:18
Speaker
And then we compare that to some kind of a task. And the idea was that not giving them a task is a good baseline for our task. Because when there's no task, the brain activation is so random ah that it'll average out to zero over subjects and over time. So that was the assumption. And at some point, people started questioning, ah including out of some of my own data, we started questioning whether REST is really a good task so ah to use this ah or a good condition to use the baseline condition.
00:16:50
Speaker
And what came out um around the early 2000s, in fact, that's what led to the formulation of the concept of the default mode network, was that there's, in fact, a certain number of regions in the brain that are more consistently active when people are doing no tasks in the scanner than other regions. So those default mode brain regions that we now are researching very heavily became kind of formulated as those parts of the brain that are actually systematically more active when there's no task. You put someone in the scanner and you don't give them anything to do. They're just quote unquote resting because we know, mentally speaking, there is no such thing as rest. The mind never rests for longer than a second or two.
00:17:36
Speaker
um But naively, I guess, neuroscientists, it was more like a wishful thinking on the part of scientists, were believing that there would be such a thing as rest that would be non-systematically recruiting the brain. So what we've learned over the last 10, maybe 20 years now, is that um when we do ask people about various ways to define mind-wandering, whether that's task-unrelated or not, or whether it's freely moving or not,
00:18:06
Speaker
um There's some parts of the brain that are more active than others um and they Do we carry some background noise, by the way? Yeah, sorry, I just had a um ah truck go by. well We'll see if we can edit that out. No, don't worry. I'll start from the beginning. Or not from the beginning, but from my sentence. Yeah, so so what we've learned in the last, um I'd say about 20 years that we'll be studying the default mode network is that um it's not just the default mode network. There's other parts of the brain that are also active and people might wonder whether it's in terms of task-related or in terms of really moving
00:18:42
Speaker
thought. But there's also some parts of the brain that are actually not as recruited during these kinds of freely moving tasks. That doesn't mean that they're completely inactive. It just means some of them are a little bit more predictably involved. And um it's not just the default mode network that tends to be involved. We've also seen very consistent executive brain network recruitment when people are thinking about something other than what they're currently doing.
00:19:10
Speaker
or mind-wandering some definition. So ah we've seen both the executive network and the default network involved when people go off task, for example. um But we also see some of the secondary sensory regions involved when people are going off task, possibly because of um mental simulations that people might be involved in when they think in off task manner.
00:19:38
Speaker
So yeah, so there's there's particular regions that are less involved and and and
Freedom from Thought Constraints
00:19:42
Speaker
more involved. And we've mentioned already, I guess there's there's less deliberation. So the parts of the brain which are associated with the user making deliberate choices are less involved. But nonetheless, there are parts of the executive function that are involved, which is kind of and intriguing. So maybe there's even though um the user's thinking quite freely, they can be thinking it seems quite deeply because they're they using a part of the brain that's, that I guess, used often in solving pretty tricky problems, if I'm correct.
00:20:18
Speaker
um And the other place um that's kind of absent is, you mentioned earlier, this there's less automatic constraints, which are instead of, you know, the force of the well is the sort of the deliberate constraints. And then these automatic constraints are the Yeah, that the the but parts of the brain associated perhaps with rumination, um the kind of the salience network, that the things that that pulls us back to our preoccupations, whether we like it or not. um So it's kind of when we're when we're out of those regions, when we're in the space of um not being tied to a task, not being tied to ah the
00:21:05
Speaker
the sort of mental ruts which we tend to to tread, then we're in mind-wandering territory. um And it's not just a kind of, I don't know, um it's not necessarily restful in in the sense of not recruiting um higher level functions.
00:21:31
Speaker
But it's restful or it's unconstrained, I suppose, in that it's not being forced by these other modules of the brain, for one of the better word. Yeah. I mean, the concept of restfulness in the mind is very interesting. And there's a lot of people who are seeking that, right? And they have different ways of going about it, whether it's through meditation or retreats or silent retreats or disconnecting from phones and so forth.
Meditation and Restfulness
00:22:01
Speaker
um Ultimately, restfulness, the way it feels in the mind, comes down to some kind of an experience of um ah felt. like It's a felt sense of restfulness. We know that the mind never rests. Even when we're asleep, the mind is crazy active. right There's always something mental happening. Even when we don't remember that we're dreaming, we're dreaming.
00:22:25
Speaker
um Even when we're not thinking about a task, the mind is very active. um There's mental states that arise on the average every 10 seconds, even in extremely highly experienced meditators.
00:22:37
Speaker
So we know that the the kind of the arising of mental states never quite stops unless you're in coma or in under general anesthesia. right So consciousness comes along when when we're conscious or even when we're dreaming, which is a form of consciousness based on what we understand now.
00:22:55
Speaker
There's always mental states that are being generated. So I think it's wrong to think of mental rest as the lack of mental states. Lack of mental states is basically anesthesia or or some kind of a lack of consciousness. As long as there's consciousness, as there's mental states. But nonetheless, people still have ah different experiences. Sometimes they're more restful in their mind. And sometimes we feel more ah restless. Right. And in fact, the original paper that introduced the term mind wandering to the literature by John Tuskor, John Tuskmawood used the restless mind in its title as a kind of synonym of this idea of mind wandering.
00:23:37
Speaker
But actually, to me, the sense of rest in the mind and and what happens in terms of content is quite dissociable. So I've done a little bit of research with um meditators and um as well as some reviews of the literature on meditation. And ah there's there's an interesting misconception about rest ah that has to do with ah equating rest with lack of thinking. And so a lot of people think that as you get more and more experienced in meditation, if you get a monk who's been meditating for decades, they're going to have very few thoughts. And therefore, that's what their that's their restful state. But actually, we find the opposite people report more mental states arising with greater experience in meditation. But one of the things that happens with more and more experience in meditation is that
00:24:29
Speaker
ah there is a less emotional response that's being evoked to each of the mental states that arise. So it's one of the ways to look at this restfulness that people oftentimes intuitively feel or not in their minds. It's not in terms of mental contents, but in terms of the emotional reactivity to our own mental contents. And um that's actually one of the things that meditation trains very deliberately.
00:24:59
Speaker
and very systematically over many years, is to not react, not attach, and not ah have emotion. So if you go back in terms of salience mechanism, ah one of the things that meditation really aims for is to decouple the salience ah reaction or the tag of salience in response to the arising of mental states.
00:25:21
Speaker
or even along with the arising of mental states. And for me, actually, that's probably at the basis of what people report to us as restfulness in terms of mental activity. Yeah. And in some ways, I think this links back to, again, the analogy between physical wandering and mind wandering. Physical wandering what what one can be moving quite a lot, but it's still a restful activity because you feel that sense of liberty, I suppose. um And there's a kind of certain disinterest um with or perhaps a standing back from one's emotions and and purposes, which, yeah, again, I think is is very restful. And yeah, it's very interesting that meditators
00:26:14
Speaker
have as much activity in their minds as anyone else, but it's just they're more able to reflect on their own activity and where they want to cut short um chains. um So yeah, I think this link to sedence is really interesting. um One kind of general thought that I've had while reading through your work is, well,
00:26:40
Speaker
even though mind wandering is unconstrained, there's still a certain kind of level of constraint there, because just as, you know, with your example of wandering around Rome, you're wandering, but you've put yourself in Rome, right? you've You've put yourself in a certain field where, you know, you're you're going to come across certain, ah you know, beautiful squares and gelato and cappuccinos and those sort of things. Whereas if you've flown to, I don't know,
00:27:09
Speaker
um out back in Australia, you'd come across kangaroos and and lots of dust and trees and things. It would be a completely different experience, um even though you know this is there's this wandering aspect. um And I'm really intrigued about the different ways that, you know given how important mind wandering seems to be, um how we can take advantage of the kind of liberty that it gives us, but without it kind of leading us into, you know, without it sort of just just floating over boring topics, right? And, you know, I was just daydreaming on in the most dull ways. I wonder if meditation can be beneficial there, if you can sort of decide to pick up certain chains of thought and say, well, this is an interesting like departure point for some
00:28:06
Speaker
ah to to I want to allow my mind to wander from, I don't know, this this thought about, I don't know, the the nature of some deep philosophical thing versus I want to let my mind wander from this, I don't know, observation of, I don't know, a chocolate that I'm interested in eating. Yeah, like, ha have you, I don't know, have you thought about ways in which um we can kind of harness this this power or adjust the um the landscapes of our mind, I guess, to best make um use of mind wandering.
00:28:40
Speaker
Yeah, great question. So to extend that analogy, and by the way, my experience usually is I love wandering around new new cities, new towns that I haven't been to, but somehow I live in Vancouver and I've lived in Vancouver for 20 years. Somehow wandering around Vancouver is not as fun for me. It's not as interesting ah because I know that city so well um and I've lived here for so long.
00:29:06
Speaker
so it made me think about the role of novelty in wandering. This idea that you're exploring and to explore some space, you shouldn't have a completely perfect cognitive map of it already built in. It's just there's this element of discovery. um But yeah, going back to, is there some way in which you can kind of ah put yourself in Rome, mentally speaking, if you're going to wander? And um To extend that analogy, for me, yeah what happens is what what is what is our mental space? What is this world in our mind? I think the world of our minds is basically composed of our experiences. The world of outside of us is composed of spaces.
00:29:47
Speaker
So it has a three dimensional quality. There's like different places you can go to. In the mind, we basically have experiences, ah experiences from the past, experiences that we might imagine could happen in the future. But really the material, what the the world is, the totality of our experiences. And I think one of the ways to put ourselves in a new interesting place to explore is to gather in your experiences. you know If you've just but read a great book about something that you're interested in,
00:30:21
Speaker
ah that is now providing you actually with a new experience. Or if you've just um met with a group of people that you found stimulating and interesting and engaging and you've never had that conversation, that's a new experience that now is adding to your world that you can now explore. So one of the things that ah that we could do to provide ourselves with more interesting things to, or more interesting things to explore mentally when we wander is to have experiences that are more interesting. you know For example, my experience during COVID was very was very sad because I felt like my world inside of me was shrinking because there was like this mono mono monotony of everyday experience felt very oppressive to me because I felt like there was nothing to actually dwell on constructively anymore.
00:31:17
Speaker
There were things to dwell on in kind of a repetitive, non-constructive and unpleasant ways, but there weren't any anything new to to reflect on and to explore mentally. So the converse of that is...
00:31:31
Speaker
you know, surrounding ourselves with the kind of experiences that both enrich us when we think about them, but also ah don't depress us. Because ah there's a combination I feel like between some kind of a positive, ah mildly positive affect that you can have in your mind wandering,
00:31:53
Speaker
but also some novelty that you can that you can have that that can help with this mental exploration to turn it into a mind wandering that not only feels good but also can be ah interesting and and constructive in terms of coming up with new ideas. The other thing that happens is actually oftentimes we have parts of our experiences that are either too traumatic to negative, or they're too habitually shunned away from awareness, that they've they've formed these vertices in our kind of mental experience, that we're really staying away from because we feel we're going to get sucked into the vortex and fall into some kind of a negative affect negative emotion around them. And so that's like the equivalent of trying to wander around
00:32:42
Speaker
a war to torn zone, right? ah There are these places in our mind. So one reaction to that is to not go and try to wander there and to just wander in the realms of our mind, right in a pleasant safe spaces. um But I think mind wandering also has that's, that's where we start going towards ways in it in which mind wandering can feel unadaptive, but actually on occasion we need to make it negative in order to incorporate more of our experiences in our um kind of mental world. So oftentimes people say, my wondering is bad for you, and there's even papers that have been published with that title, ah which I don't think are necessarily hold up to empirical investigation. My wondering per se is neither bad or good.
00:33:36
Speaker
right? It depends on so many things that you cannot formulate it in that simplistic, dichotomous terms. But um yeah, so what happens with my monitoring is that Not only does it have ah the function of sometimes increasing your positive effect because you're wandering around mental space that that's fun, interesting and pleasant, but also it can help you connect other parts of your experience that are not so pleasant to in ways that are imaginative and safe. You're not actually re-experiencing the trauma that you might have had or the highly negative experiences of the past.
00:34:15
Speaker
You are thinking about them now and ah it has a way of uncovering some of these vortices in the mind. and potentially giving us the choice of whether to you know how to approach them, whether to continue keeping away from them or whether or not to. So I think all this mental travel ah in our minds is actually very important. But unfortunately, most of us are highly unskilled in how to travel in our own minds, in our own experiences.
00:34:47
Speaker
Because from elementary schooling onwards, we've been solved the myth of our capitalist society, which tells you that unless you're getting something out of what you're currently thinking about, ah therefore that's not good for you. And ah if you're not paying attention to what you're currently doing, ah there's it's not actually just capitalist society that's gotten us there. There's a lot more historically um found ways in which we have tried to constrain our own minds. It starts from like you know religious texts that tell us things like, you know, the idol mind is the devil's workshop or some kind of attitude towards this um not paying attention but ah that can be quite ingrained in our minds.
00:35:36
Speaker
So that makes us very constrained as to where we explore, which of our experiences we explore, and also which experiences we accumulate for exploring. It could make us make us aversive towards seeking potentially negative, challenging experiences, right? um Not seeking, but like aversive towards anything that could turn out to be that way. And also it it makes us aversive in our minds as to whether if I mind wander, who knows, maybe I'll come across something in my experience that's unpleasant. And so people may feel it's safer not to mind wander, because I can stay in this narrow but ah familiar range of my experience that I'm kind of happy with. So we can be risk averse in that way in our own mind wandering. So many things to to talk about here. I mean, maybe in reverse, I mean, I think
00:36:30
Speaker
to a certain extent, our mind wandering has been replaced with um clicking through links and so forth and exploring external sources of information instead of exploring our own minds. I think partly because maybe we feel that's more productive because we feel like we're getting new information when actually it might be a richer source to to look within ourselves oftentimes and and and start to make um links. i think it feels safer, like you say, less dangerous sometimes to, um yeah, to scroll through the news than to um scroll through our own mind. um And as you say, I mean, I think there's also this idea of productivity. I'm reading a book, The Politics of Time by Guy Standing. And um one of the, I think the first chapter he talks about how the Greeks had many different um
00:37:26
Speaker
many different categories for the way that time is used than we do now. We have sort of work and leisure, and that's about it. And they had work, they had labor, work and labor were different things. But they also had, um among others, contemplation, which was a ah use of time, which I think really does map quite well to mind wandering. It wasn't um designed to be productive, if I understand it um correctly. And I think the word for contemplation was theoria or theoria, if I'm right. So it's really interesting how
00:38:03
Speaker
how how we no longer sort of have a category, you know, we don't have a slot in our calendar which says contemplation, right? We have our office hours and then we have our leisure hours. And maybe we need to get back to that. um But mostly what um you made me think about was um my conversation with Jesse Munton, the philosopher who's studying salience. And we had a great conversation earlier this year. And um I think she highlighted some very similar points to you So she's really interested in how our biases may be formed, not by incorrect opinions, but just having the wrong sort of cognitive maps, if you like. So we we kind of gather it. For example, if we gather our beliefs along racial lines, um we might not have any incorrect beliefs. But if the first thing that we think about when we think of
00:39:00
Speaker
um and a person of a particular ethnicity are lots of things which kind of attach to um traditionally to that culture. um You know, those beliefs might be generally correct, but we're we're not seeing them as an individual. um And that can be very problematic. And, you know, one of the things I mean, she makes two points, which I think do um echo very much what you're saying. One one of the points is you need to be quite deliberate about the way that you um choose your sources of information because it affects these kind of less conscious processes. And so again, like if we if we deliver it by about putting ourselves in Rome or in or in interesting sections of the library or whatever it is, we'll pick up new and interesting um pieces of information that will will will enrich our mind wandering and not just our kind of
00:39:56
Speaker
ah more conscious beliefs. um And the second point that she made was, yeah, it's it's really important not to have um sort of very closed off networks of belief within our minds. um You don't want, I mean, you don't, you can't have a completely um chaotic brain where every idea is linked to every other idea.
00:40:20
Speaker
and But you don't want to have very strong categories. You want to be able to sort of move between um different areas fairly freely. um And I think that relates to your point that it can be unhealthy to have completely kind of sealed off areas, things that we just don't want to consider. Because if we do find ourselves kind of slipping into that,
00:40:43
Speaker
um area of our minds, we might find it very difficult, you know, that's where rumination can happen. um And that's where there can be kind of pathological effects, whereas if we allow ourselves to create more links between our sort of centers of belief, perhaps, or centers of personality,
00:41:07
Speaker
um we can be more cognitively flexible. um and And it's really interesting because she's she's come at this from a very theoretical standpoint, not looking at images of the brain or doing any experiments, but just trying to think about and if we have this problem um that we seem to have around salience in just how we organize our beliefs, um you know just using armchair observations of a philosopher, which I think are a valid form of observation. ah And you've found, I think you've come to quite similar conclusions by by actually looking at um you know doing more controlled experiments and and thinking of it from starting from a different starting point. So I find that absolutely fascinating.
00:41:50
Speaker
Yeah, i I totally agree. I think Jesse Montan's ideas for ah based around salience are very much related to what um um I refer to as automatic constraints. In fact, salience, I consider it to be one of the sources of automatic constraints in the mind. ah Mental habits are another source that I think is really interesting. Sometimes things can become habitual and then they can constrain the men the mind even when there's no sedians present just because of um basal ganglia mechanisms that we don't completely understand, but we know or exist. So I think sedians is important it's really important in the process of establishing habits.
00:42:30
Speaker
and then it can lose its importance over time when the habits are established. But for the most part, salience can be very much what establishes the biases. the the biases And biases by themselves are not a problem. Biases are indispensable. You cannot get rid of biases. The question is, which biases do you have? right And which biases you have are determined by your exposure.
00:42:57
Speaker
Like in the case of me having a biased perception of a certain ethnic group, um oftentimes it actually comes from lack of exposure to this group in a personal sense, right? So if if I've had, let's say, a partner in my life who was a member of that group, my exposure would be very different than if I had only interacted with that group.
00:43:20
Speaker
ah in some kind of a very superficial capacity. And so we know actually from research that when people become less prejudiced is after they've had a relationship with people from the group that they used to be prejudiced against. So these personal interactions, which ultimately are what helps us think of the person as an individual rather than as a member of a category that I have certain wrong perceptions of are impossible to actually form. it's in so In some sense, it's actually impossible to think of a person as completely as a person unless I have the personal experience of having them in my life as as that kind of a person. So I think that just really underscores the importance of what we're surrounded by, how we build our lives and how we build our social networks.
00:44:07
Speaker
who we put in power, right? Because being exposed to people in power also automatically changes our ability to empathize with these people. um And I think all these are really important for our minds. And that's, I agree with Jesse Montan in that sense, of that that's a really much ah underappreciated influence on our own thinking and our own mind. ah We actually feel like, oh, I can't control that because I can't,
00:44:36
Speaker
automatically change. I can't immediately change my mind right now about my biases and so forth. But actually, what we can control is the things we surround ourselves with, we have some measure of control that we can influence it, we can completely control it. So I think a lot of these automatic constraints on the mind or the spontaneous thought processes that I'm interested in, are in some ways very similar to sleep. So you know, if you're trying to um improve your sleep, and let's say you're having troubles falling asleep, um the worst thing you can do is try to force yourself to fall asleep, you know, you go in bed and start monitoring every 10 seconds, am I asleep? Am I asleep? Am I asleep? Or try to will yourself into falling asleep, everyone knows that that's just
00:45:20
Speaker
complete recipe for keeping yourself awake all night. So instead what we do though, so some people give up. It's like, well, I can't do this. I don't know. I'm not going to be able to sleep. ah But what we can do and we know that we can do is change the environment and the circumstances that increase the chance that we would fall asleep and create a ritual, create ah a habit ah that the the body and the brain can anticipate ah over time that this is the time when I go to bed, this is the time when I turn off the lights. So all this actually then creates an automatic process um of switching the brain from awake to asleep.
00:46:04
Speaker
And I think something very similar happens in our thoughts. you know When we have ah an automatic judgment about a person or a place or any of these biases that we have, they're there no matter what. ah We have these automatic judgments and they're there because of um the environment, the exposure, the experiences that we've accumulated. And the only way to change them is not by thinking hard or, I mean, I'm sad to say even all these training, um you know, anti-bias and anti-racism training that a lot of people are now having to take online.
00:46:42
Speaker
I don't think they're damaging, but they're also not effective because in no way do they change my exposure to ah things in my real life. So just because I logged in online and did a course for half an hour, that doesn't change my automatic thoughts in any way and my spontaneous thoughts. The only thing that it changes that is having different experiences and not just one different experience, but also amassing multiple experiences over time that are then going to get distilled into a new ah intuition in the future, a new automatic judgment that will come in in the future. Yeah, very good. Yeah, I completely agree. I think there are certain sorts of
00:47:25
Speaker
problem we need to come out obliquely and and sleep is one and and and this problem of um making sure we have the right kind of biases um is another. I'd suggest as well that you know in lieu of experiences, you know sometimes stories will work. I mean, I agree. I think just giving people stats and facts is not going to change that kind of mental landscape. OK, you've got facts that you can recall, but it's not going to change your automatic responses. But giving you know creating a story or something around um something I think can do. And so those are probably also underestimated tools.
00:48:07
Speaker
um I think another problem that we need... Yeah, go ahead, sorry. I'm just going to jump in on the the topic of stories. I absolutely agree. They're underestimated in some sense, but they're also very widely spread in our world nowadays, just in terms of all the media that we consume. Of course, most of the media that captures our mind has some story to it.
00:48:31
Speaker
And whether it's a streaming service where you're binging on some show or whether it's TikTok where you're getting like little snippets, the things that these are actually a lot of our experiences now are not ourselves in the real world. And I find that actually quite tragic, but they're simulated experiences.
00:48:51
Speaker
they were getting in through stories and they can absolutely be very powerful in creating statistics in our mind as to what the world is like and and how we should spontaneously respond and automatically respond to it.
00:49:05
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's right. I think that's right. If you, you might watch the news for half an hour and then watch a drama for half an hour every night, let's say, but actually it could be the drama that is far more influential over how you act in your everyday life and, and, you know, your beliefs about the world. um Even if you're, you know even if when pushed for statistics, you report things correctly, um they might just be a very, very thin part of um your understanding of ah this yeah the world we live in. um yeah I think, again, it just points to this the same idea of having to be quite judicious um and in and in putting ourselves in the right place, consuming the right sorts of experience.
00:49:47
Speaker
um And the hardest part is, you know, who decides what is right. This is the hardest part, right? I mean, ultimately, we ourselves have to decide what is right. um But that's the chicken and egg then problem where we eat what feels right is what we've been exposed to. um So the change can be very tricky if it's completely ah left to the individual.
00:50:17
Speaker
um It's just very hard. So there's um there's no good way of I think we have to decide for ourselves ultimately and Sometimes we don't even have that much control over what we're exposed to um So that's the other thing to grapple with we have some influence as to what we're exposed to but also that Influence can be a form of privilege as well. Like some of us have more resources to let's say not expose ourselves to you know streaming and media and TikTok, whereas other people who have less resources are and their kids are going to end up being exposed to to the media. So I think the choice over our exposure is not as easy as it seems based on the philosophical and neuroscientific ah discussions.
00:51:06
Speaker
Which actually, for me, what that does is it really brings up the importance of public policy in this matter. So starting with education, starting with um regulation of ah as much as I don't like regulation. I grew up in a Soviet influenced country, Bulgaria, and I grew up with ah very much authoritarian regulation, so in in general my intuition is against regulation, but I also ah feel that in order for us to be able to change and not start by of having the right, having the wrong
00:51:44
Speaker
oh biases, it's really important that we're very um thoughtful and actually regulating in terms of what children get exposed to and teenagers get exposed to education wise and media wise. um So i'm I'm really glad to see some very recent movements.
00:52:02
Speaker
I know that in Australia there is a discussion to ban social media for kids under 16, which ah is going to be very hard to implement, but I think it's the right thing to be considering. um I don't know how we can implement it, but regulations over that would be so important because effectively a lot of these exposures are very addictive and we are not allowing them to consume highly addictive substances. um And also the other thing I heard is that I've made arguments among my colleagues in my department, sometimes at gatherings, when I say as academics, we shouldn't be using um social media outlets such as Twitter slash X, because we have the social responsibility to not enable
00:52:48
Speaker
this platform that is so damaging in so many ways to society. And whenever I say something like that, there's a dead silence in a room. People think, I don't know, I've gone crazy or that there's no way for academics to not use Twitter because it's so important for them and so forth. I don't use Twitter. And um I know that by that, to some extent, I'm ostracizing myself. But one of the recent developments that I heard, which ah was very promising,
00:53:18
Speaker
for my point of view is I heard that the Guardian newspapers in in the UK is going to stop posting their articles on Twitter slash X. And that's the kind of thing that ah could help much more than informing the individual as to how to have the right biases, because what feels right to them is what they already have. Yeah.
00:53:41
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I think um there's a big move to blue sky. i i I'm going to move myself to blue sky. This is a very good sort of okay kick to do so. um Yeah, I believe that law has just passed in Australia. So um yeah, social media will be banned. As you say, I'm not sure how it will be implemented. But I do think these things, it's a little bit like again, it's a little bit like the deliberate versus the automatic part of the mind. I think the law um is is that impetus, it's that kind of deliberate statement, but it's the culture that needs to change. But I think enacting this law can be a big assistance to the cultural change, which is kind of, that's the automatic thing. That's the thing that really matters. Like do people, ah if it becomes normal for children not to have access to social media, um then
00:54:37
Speaker
there's this kind of reverse viral effect, I suppose, when few enough people are using it under a particular age, it just doesn't become interesting to use anymore. And I yeah um i think you know it's realistic to hope that that can can happen. um Yeah, it it's really it's it's really a difficult thing. Like you say, there's there's a chicken and egg thing here because we're already influenced by all these platforms. ah But I'm hopeful, again, that you know we are
00:55:06
Speaker
We're very self-conscious beings. We're able to look at and criticize our own beliefs. Often all it takes is like a little bit of space to step back and think, actually, am I am i using the right platforms? Am I reading the right um source of information? Or should I just be a little bit more out in the world? um So yeah. and i'm I'm ever an optimist on these things. um One thing I wanted to ask ah about the kind of again about the ah oblique ways that we can come at um problems is is creativity and
00:55:41
Speaker
ah i I've read your work on how mind wandering is a kind of component of creativity. um And again, it's one of these things where you can't just say, I want to be creative. right I've got to come up with like the best slogan for for this. You can you can situ sit you ah situate yourself um within a problem. um But one often does well to, yes, sort of
00:56:11
Speaker
be reflexive again and not be too intentional, not too teleological, I suppose. But yeah, do you have any kind of more practical advice about how one can be creative based on your research? Yeah, you know, that actually, I'm glad we didn't start with a definition of creativity, because creativity, even much more so than mind wandering, is a deeply problematic concept that we're studying and and we're looking at.
00:56:41
Speaker
um I think for me, every every time a mental state arises, every time I have a thought, that's a form of creativity. Now, some of the thoughts I have are more creative than others. ah Sometimes I have thoughts that are really repetitive and mundane, and sometimes I have um an insight about something or a new thought that I thought, hey, that was actually really interesting. And so every time we have a thought,
00:57:07
Speaker
we're creating something. and so and And again, that can range in terms of the the novelty of it and the the usefulness. So I think in some ways um we already are There's like a mini version of creativity that we're engaging about in and the extent to which we can actually engage in the kind of contemplation you mentioned ah was regarded as ah is a good thing to do in ancient Greece, of course, by the people who had the time and resources to cut out the time of day to do it. um That's already a step towards being creative.
00:57:45
Speaker
But in general, I think the question you're asking is more general as to what are good tips to actually be successful at something that I cannot be, the i cannot be um ah that I have to be obliquely approaching, as you said. I like that forum, actually. so the oblique approach or the indirect way of setting things up. So for me, and I've done some work on psychedelics as well. And one of the big terms, one of the big phrases in psychedelics is set and setting, which basically has all the influence on how people will experience their psychedelic trip.
00:58:20
Speaker
So based on the set and setting you can have a terrible trip or you can have an amazing eye-opening, insightful experience. And so what it comes down to is that the set and the setting basically refer to the context and the environment and the people you are surrounded with or not, like you could be alone.
00:58:39
Speaker
And your set is the mindto man the the mental mindset that you're approaching the experience with, whether you're positive, whether you're negative, whether you're just gone through something traumatic versus something amazing, positive. And so those two things, the environment that you're in,
00:58:57
Speaker
ah the why you're trying to be creative and how you're approaching it I think um are basically what determines pretty much anything spontaneous that happens in the in the brain whether it's falling asleep whether it's being creative or um whether it's you know having a psychedelic trip So the, and and basically, I think a lot of these spontaneous phenomena are also similar to the way we play when we're, let's say, when we're very young when we're kids. So if you want a kid to be able to play and have a good time and and enjoy their play and maybe learn something from their play, what you want to do is you create an environment for them.
00:59:36
Speaker
And also you make sure that they're not afraid, they're not hungry, they don't have any pressing big ah needs that need to be addressed. And so I think the same way if we want to be more creative, we don't sit down and and tell ourselves to be creative and then check every five seconds if we're being creative enough.
00:59:55
Speaker
ah If you do the same thing with a kid, they're not going to be playing, right? They're going to be very kind of oppressed. Instead, what we do is I think for creativity is the best thing to do is to create the conditions that are going to make um make us more likely to be creative. These conditions are the same as the conditions you would create for kids to be able to play. You need a sense of safety. You need a sense of um some kind of a very loose structure.
01:00:22
Speaker
A lot of play is really ah cannot happen unless you have some very loose structure that actually creates the sense of safety. um And um you know we can be I can be creative in a place that I feel very uncomfortable, I have to be some left have to be some somewhat comfortable. And then I think the mindset, so that's the setting, and then the mindset, what really helps is to have a mindset of um curiosity, again, a mindset that's not I must deliver, because as soon as you have the set of I must achieve, I must deliver, and it has to be done by, you know, the next hour, that can then ah basically suppress a lot of the spontaneous processes. So so having a sense of ah the other thing that really helps with creativity, is having an environment of positivity, where you're getting some um
01:01:18
Speaker
positive feedback, um whether it that, and it doesn't have to be a feedback. So here's an example, for example, that that I often give. I played the piano and i've been doing I've been learning to play jazz in the last 20 years.
01:01:33
Speaker
And so sometimes i when I'm part of a group or we're trying to play together with other people, some of the best times when I feel the most creative in these situations is when I feel like the people around me occasionally give me a little bit of positive feedback, right? And it doesn't have to be huge. It doesn't have to be like, oh my God, you're so amazing. It just has to be like, yeah, that was good. So there's a little bit of ah an encouragement, a little bit some some kind of a way in which we can feel that uh we're doing well right and so that's the kind of thing that can improve creativity a lot as well um just because it creates a little bit of positive emotion and a mild positive of emotion is really conducive to spontaneous processes an extreme positive emotion might be too much the salience of that might be too high right like an extreme positive emotion of uh
01:02:30
Speaker
some like extreme joy or extreme happiness that can take over the mind as well extreme negative emotion can be detrimental as well but a mild sense of positivity safety and um curiosity and fun right? Those can be very, um very strummented towards being more creative, both in our own minds when we think and when we're working on some project. So if you can create a sense of ah safety, fun, and um curiosity, ah that's pretty much the conditions that will help the mind do a lot of these spontaneous things, including being creative. Wow. Yeah, lovely. I wonder as well if um
01:03:15
Speaker
particularly with jazz, the that sort of like maybe nod or like, you know, that that little, that little just, that small sign that someone's enjoying what you're playing, it's kind of like an outsourcing of the evaluation that normally one has to do when one is kind of in a creative mode where you're kind of reflecting, you're periodically reflecting on what you're producing and questioning yourself, is this good or is this bad? And and by not having to kind of slip into that,
01:03:43
Speaker
more deliberate executive mode. um And it being outsourced, it it maybe doesn't interrupt the flow so much. um it it it It reminds me as well, actually, of some of the kind of games that um poets play where um they they will kind of constrain themselves to a smaller vocabulary or to a particular um ah talk to Christian Burke and he has like really strong constraints on his poetry like he'll only use the vowel e for a whole chapter of poems or something and um you know that removes a lot of his choice and in some ways it makes it much more deliberate um but in other ways it it it kind of removes a lot of the um
01:04:27
Speaker
the options that you have. ah The other thing that people do is they just say, I'm just going to randomly pull letters out of a bag or words out of bag, make a front load all the choices into choosing what the words are. Right. And and so then it becomes a very, um very, very random process. um Yeah, so I think there's there's kind of many games I suppose we can play with creativity. um and Yeah.
01:04:53
Speaker
I also really love the analogy with play. And I talked to Gordon Burghart, who um came up with the canonical definition of play within animal psychology, within... And a few of the features are exactly the things you mentioned. So lack of lack of stresses or you know lack of um ah disease, hunger, and so forth.
01:05:20
Speaker
um Indogenous reward, right? that's so That's a very clear feature of play. You just do it because you enjoy playing. There's not a particular end in sight. And also a lack of clear, iuver like a lack of very immediate adaptive function. um And again, I think mind wandering has those features that and in both get both play and mind wandering, there is an adaptive function one presumes, but it's just not easy to kind of pin down, I suppose.
01:05:54
Speaker
and Where this leads me, though, is do we know if animals mind wander? Because before Gordon Burghardt introduced his definition of play, it was very kind of controversial to even ascribe play as an animal behavior. And now, ethologists do recognize that many animals play. um Do we think that maybe um animals also mind wander?
01:06:21
Speaker
ah
01:06:24
Speaker
Good question. I absolutely think animals think. They don't probably think in the ways that we do. They probably don't, obviously they don't think in words.
01:06:37
Speaker
We think in words, some of us think in words a lot. I don't think in words a lot, actually. I mean, I can, but most of the time my thoughts are in the form of images. And a lot of times my thoughts are in the form of musical sounds. So um all these things, what they are, words, sounds, or images, they're effectively mental simulations of experiences.
01:07:01
Speaker
And they don't have to be very difficult right but thoughts are that thoughts are simulations of experience there like experiences that. Where are not tied to our current sensory environment better combined from other sensory experiences that we've had in the past and imagined in the future.
01:07:22
Speaker
So I think absolutely animals, like we know that, um um let's say rodents, you can do a single cell recording study in rats and observe in their hippocampus a replay of the activity of neurons that were active while the rat was exploring a maze. And now the rat is asleep or is resting and doing nothing. um You can see the same neuron.
01:07:48
Speaker
ah Replaying the activation sometimes in reverse order sometimes in exact order of the firing rates that were happening while the animal was exploring and exactly even mapping the place else based on the places that rat was exploring in the past.
01:08:07
Speaker
So there's all kinds of really cool research that just shows that you know pretty much any animal with a hippocampus is going to have something called a replay and sometimes preplay of experience, which means that sometimes the animals are anticipating going into maze. And you can see the order of cells firing. And because cells have a place specificity in the hippocampus, they code for particular places, you could actually track the animal navigating a maze during their sleep in the same way that they navigated it during the wakeful state. so For me, that's a form of thought. um But interestingly, in humans, and we don't completely understand the difference between conscious and unconscious thought, that's one of the things that I'm really interested in exploring more in the future. What we see is that humans also, we can see activations in the Hippo Campus with fMRI, not with single cell recordings that we've done.
01:09:02
Speaker
um But when people do report conscious awareness of their thoughts, that tends to go along with activations in the more cortical regions of the brain. So it's possible that what happens in the hippocampus and the more subcortical structures is not what we consciously experience, but it's something that we actually don't consciously experience. And so that actually raises a big and interesting question as to whether that's thought or not. And we don't know the answer to that question yet. But what we do know is that animals brains are very similar to our brains that they replay experiences in some very similar ways. We don't know if they're consciously experienced those as well. But we know that the neural level um that is happening. So how does that translate to mind wandering?
01:09:51
Speaker
um Again, it's very hard to study because um the way to study spontaneous mental processes in humans is to rely on the human being's ah report of what they're experiencing at any moment of time. And with animals, we cannot have these verbal reports.
01:10:12
Speaker
um That being said, there's a lot of social interactions that animals can have. That's probably how play was established in animals. Obviously, when they play with each other, they're almost always playing in social manner with other animals. So you can guess a lot about an animal's mental state, including a human animal's mental state, based on their facial expressions, based on their where they look with their eyes and so forth.
01:10:38
Speaker
so ah One of the interesting things that we haven't done so far is try to extend some of the findings from humans and our own facial expressions during mind wandering. to um some of the animal studies that that might be done in non-human animals like other apes, for example. ah But that those kind of ah experiments are actually pretty hard to do just because, and I'm not sure how I personally feel about doing experiments with non-human animals, especially apes, given that um my few interactions
01:11:12
Speaker
ah face to face with ah other apes. have been very eye-opening in the sense that I can see, I can project my own mental states very easily and imagine that they're experiencing something very similar. Now that's entirely subjective to me um but there's something about, and again um my experience comes from a couple of occasions when I've been to um the San Diego Zoo which has the largest bonobo
01:11:45
Speaker
groups outside of the Congo in in any place in the world. And so, first of all, I'm really oftentimes conflicted about going to Zeus in general, because I feel that I'm not sure how I feel about the existence of Zeus at all. I actually don't feel good about ah their existence. But the times when I've been there mostly with my kids and I've come eye to eye with a gorilla,
01:12:12
Speaker
and one of the zoos ah through a glass enclosure. And with a widow a bonobo, I felt a reflection of my eye gaze, which is one of the things that we use to infer consciousness in another animal, yeah the extent to which there's a lock of the eye movements. And so ah although that's not a scientific ah basis for observations, um I think a lot of people's intuitions would probably agree with mine is that there's at least in other apes, there's a lot of conscious mental activity going on. ah That is probably not very different from what we're experiencing. And all of these animals have experiences. All of them have hippocampus that connects to their cortex. They all have cortices that are very similar to ours. And so there's no reason from the few studies that exist where single cell recordings are being
01:13:08
Speaker
um observed and um inferred as to how they spread throughout the brain, ah we can see default network um existence in pretty much any animal species, ah especially primates and rodents that have been looked at. So there's ah for sure, to actually have a memory, they need to have a way of replaying their experiences.
01:13:34
Speaker
And because for me thought is basically working with our experiences, whether you're replaying them, whether you're combining them in novel ways, um and you're not necessarily doing that deliberately, right? You're doing that through unconscious processes that are bubbling up to consciousness into consciousness. um There's zero reason for me to doubt that animals have something similar and for some animals like apes, something very similar to what we have.
01:14:02
Speaker
in terms of exploring our space of experiences. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think, you know as you say, both play and mind wandering are these ways of imagining other ways the world might be, which which clearly has a very strong evolutionary um function.
01:14:21
Speaker
I would say, I mean, from talking to people like Gordon Burkhardt and also Kristen Andrews, who's based not too far from you at the University of York in in Canada, um I think there's been a bit of a recognition that the there was too much rejection. There was too much kind of anti anthropomorphism of animals. um And there was a just so much reluctance that's been instilled in scientists to not ascribe any human characteristics to animals. And wherever possible, just say, Oh, this is a ah fixed action pattern. And, you know, it's locking eyes with you because
01:15:01
Speaker
um not because of any kind of mind behind it, but that's just what it happens to do every time some ah you know eyes meet it. um and And in reality, the the better explanation of many of these behaviours is the complexity of a mind um and the complexity of consciousness. um So i I feel like um you know we shouldn't be are so apologetic about seeing ah reflections of consciousness in in other animals, and there's so much evidence, as you say, that you know it's real, it's genuine, and it's um the best way the of making sense of the world, and therefore the the scientific ah option should um should be to admit that.
01:15:45
Speaker
and Yeah, I wanted to come back as well i mean into just these kind of themes of, well, how do we do this science? um You hinted earlier about some other ways of of making progress or kind of the the the questions behind the questions, if you like. um Could you elaborate on on that? Yeah, so I mean, even just going back to the question that you just brought up about projecting minds in non-human animals. um I feel that a lot of the science of the mind has been artificially defining human as, and and all of our concepts and approaches are oftentimes um cutting a portion of the human mind and saying, this is the mind. Right. Therefore, we're so different from other animals.
01:16:38
Speaker
And oftentimes the portion that's being cut is that conscious, um controlled, ah deliberate way of having a mind. um which ah So for me, there's a big difference between the mind and consciousness or mental experience and consciousness. And for me, consciousness is just a sliver of the mind. It's just one of the one of the the layers of mind.
01:17:06
Speaker
And for me, most of the mind is actually not conscious, but that's also the part of the mind that's in general harder to study with our current scientific methodologies.
01:17:19
Speaker
And um the scientific methodology is effectively what we consider science oftentimes requires some kind of an experimental control. That's actually not a ah necessary feature of the scientific method. um For example, ethnologists would have like naturalistic observation where you know instead of going, if you want to understand how a group of bonobos, let's say,
01:17:45
Speaker
ah work, one way to do is to is to try to get a bonobo out of the group and put them in a cage and do experiments with that bonobo. So that will be considered. um That's often how science is viewed. And now you can control what kind of stimuli the bonobo sees and you can measure the reaction time and follow the eye movements really precisely and whatnot.
01:18:08
Speaker
um But the other way to study how bonobos live is to observe them without them knowing that you're observing them yeah um or with them knowing like a lot of ethnologies would go and embed themselves in the group until the bonobos do not feel any more observed as much because they accept the human person. And so what you now observe, what you're now doing is actually I believe still science, but in current scientific circles, the observation, the naturalistic observation is considered low quality science or non science.
01:18:44
Speaker
And the kind of controlled put it in a cage and control its environment and measure it really precisely is considered top high quality, the only kind of science is worth doing. And I think that value-based judgment of what scientific methods are proper science and what are quasi-science or non-science,
01:19:08
Speaker
is actually really damaging for our understanding of the mind. And this is something that I've become really passionate about more recently and trying to um bring some explicit way of understanding our own biases in sciences and scientists in terms of being able to study the mind.
01:19:25
Speaker
So why is it so harmful for understanding the mind? It's because it actually enables this artificial cutting off of what the mind is because ah you can study the control part of the mind relatively easily if you take put it in a cage and give it a task and measure the reaction times and the accuracy of the of the person doing the task. Because the control part of the the mind which mostly corresponds to what we're now referring to as the control networks of the brain, so the executive control network. And there's another um control network that's sometimes researched as well. Those are actually fairly easy to influence through external tasks and also through our own minds, through our own intentions. So I can actually activate my executive brain network fairly reliably by just forcing myself to do something in my mind.
01:20:19
Speaker
the so um there's been a ah partly a ah combination of um kind of an ideological approach to what the mind is. The mind is that which we can study and the rest we're not going to ah even think of as a mind because we can't study it and we're proper scientists therefore we're not going to engage in this um you know underrated type of naturalistic observation that's kind of that's been the approach.
01:20:49
Speaker
But when it comes to the part of the mind that is not controllable, which is most of the mind, if not the vast majority of it, um then well we can we can still study it, but we have to rely on people's observations of their own minds as scientists. So we have to ask people right now, are you having a spontaneous thought or are you having a deliberate thought? Or we have to ask them right now, how did your mind feel?
01:21:18
Speaker
And then ah we can look at their brain activations, for example, based on their reports. ah But as a scientist, we have to be comfortable with the fact that our tool is not some kind of a machine. that's gone this Obviously, I'm going to use fMRI, but the fMRI signal doesn't mean anything until I separate the signals into the times when the person felt spontaneous and the times when the person the person felt deliberate.
01:21:44
Speaker
So there's a discomfort, I think, that we have a scientist into relinquishing our experimental control and making it making our results being dependent on what people tell us about their mind. And I think that discomfort is a big problem for our field because it's making certain ah topics like spontaneous thought either um be outlawed from study, which it was, until the end of the 20th century, basically.
01:22:14
Speaker
or be relegated to the backwaters of science. It's like, yes, you can study it, but we're not going to feature that in the next big conference of scientists you go to because it doesn't feel like proper science. So we're basically carving out the mind into the one that's worth studying and worth finding. And that tends to be the control part of the mind. And the one that's like, yeah, it's okay to study, but it's like for soft things like creativity and spontaneity and daydreaming. And yes, we know people do it, but that's not what's important to study and what's important to learn about. Yeah, yeah, really interesting. So kind of playing that back, we've
01:22:58
Speaker
we focused on just the deliberate executive functions of the mind, because according to the kind of traditional ways that the science has operated, that's the only one that we can study. But in fact, if we are a bit more relaxed, a bit more naturalistic, and we don't um ah require the imposition of control conditions,
01:23:19
Speaker
um we can we can extend the scope of what studies, you know, radically. ah I think again, yeah, I think the and comparison with what's happened in mythology is really interesting because um actually the use of Again, much of animal behavior can't be studied in zoos, and certainly not in in labs. I mean, animal culture in particular cannot be studied outside of the wild. um But even very, um even oftentimes, particular, ah I mean, this is perhaps more of a problem with with studies of animal minds than than human minds, but but oftentimes we,
01:24:03
Speaker
we put animals in control conditions, which are very unrealistic. Like it might just be the wrong temperature for a reptile. and So it's like super sluggish. And we think, oh, like it's really it's really poor at doing this task, but it's just really slow. But I mean, the so this say a similar sort of thing can happen, um you know I suppose, white white coat syndrome, where um people who are subjects in psychological experiments just behave very differently, I suppose. But so yeah, um I mean, what would be,
01:24:35
Speaker
This is a very kind of sci-fi question, um but what would be your kind of ideal tool for for for studying this? skip Can you imagine almost ah a wearable where users are going about their days and you're seeing different areas of the brain light up and then you're able to correlate it to the sort of time use that they've had in their day, um how many things they've got done, um what they've reported about their state of mind and and the types of thoughts that they're having.
01:25:03
Speaker
um Is that complete sci-fi or is there some something along those lines that we could aspire to? at This point it is sci-fi for sure. I mean, the ideal tool will be a tool that gives us information about the activation of every neuron of the brain, or let's say 10% of the neurons of the brain, if we can. ah Right now, there's there's some studies being done with single cell recordings in patients who are scheduled to have surgery for epilepsy. So this is
01:25:36
Speaker
the only time when ah we get some data. Again, I have some um reservations about the you know the the research there's some really high quality research coming out of that, but also it's being done on people who are waiting for surgery and they have these electrodes implanted in their brain.
01:25:58
Speaker
ah so This is not awareable by any standard. they're in a state where Oftentimes, ah they have some pain relievers or some pretty ah significant amount of sedation to help them cope with the fact that they actually have an open surgery in their head right now. so it Also, these are patients who are suffering from intractable epilepsy ah and so much so that they have been advised to potentially consider surgery on their brain to alleviate their epilepsy.
01:26:28
Speaker
and we know that the epilepsy tends to change the function of especially places like the Hebrew campus that are most interesting to look at in terms of the generation of thoughts. So these are the only findings we have so far and they are done they are required in some very unusual to say the least circumstances and um even though they this research is happening and it's um very um informing us a lot. It's also it's got some limitations to it too.
01:27:02
Speaker
so The ideal technology at some point would be to be able to record non-invasively from the brain because any invasive recording has its problems. Even fMRI has these issues where people have to not move. is Our bodies were made to move here. I'm talking to you right now and gesturing with my arms because it helps me move. It helps me think, right? And oftentimes people, we put them in a scanner and we tell them, OK, think, but don't move.
01:27:29
Speaker
Sometimes people actually report like they're that their faults are changing by that requirement as well. So yeah, ideally we would have some kind of a non-invasive way of recording ah information of of the brain cells in order to to see how the activation spreads from one part of the brain to the other.
01:27:49
Speaker
I don't know if that will ever be invented. I actually don't think that we'll have that anywhere in the near future. In fact, part of me hopes that we don't have because I also have fears about how it can be misused if we have that. And um I think in general, we already have a lot of wearable technology, including the iPhone that I carry around with me in my hand most of the time.
01:28:11
Speaker
that is interfering with our mental states already quite a lot. And if we had something that could record from every neuron of of the brain, um that might create even more ah opportunities for interference with our mental mental lives. So I think in general actually one of the best ways to study um is what we pretty much already we have. We have our own minds to observe the consequences of what happens in our the unconscious part of our mind. So we have our unconscious mind to observe the consequences and um I think in the end the best way of studying
01:28:53
Speaker
A person's mind is that same person's mind. So ultimately, each of us is the authority and the best scientist to understand the workings of our own mind. It's just that we don't give ourselves that opportunity or we don't have that in our lives because we just don't have time. We have to work all the time or we have to progress, right?
01:29:13
Speaker
So one of the things that we can do is the best way for me to understand my mind is to just observe how it works in different circumstances. But I think the findings that we have from science, from fMRI especially, are really helpful in just giving us that courage.
01:29:31
Speaker
in the value of observing the workings of our own minds. um Because what we see are some pretty amazing things. We see that there's activation going on in the subcortical parts of the brain that are usually not linked to conscious awareness that are happening like seconds before people are experiencing a spontaneous thought. So what the fMRI results are showing is that there's a lot going on in our minds and in our brains that we're not aware of. And even that and just the evidence for that that we have from fMRI is a really good starting point for just
01:30:08
Speaker
spending more time with our minds and um you know learning more about all these things that that is happening that we're not aware of, that we're not conscious of, but it influences then how we think, what we're conscious of, and what we decide to do with our lives. um So I think the combination that we have with FMRI and of just subjective observations, introspective observations, is quite powerful. And we've learned very little of what we could learn just by what we already have is technology. Yeah, yeah. um <unk>re We're coming up against time, um but I do want to ask you if you have any like particular experiments that you're really excited about or you would love to run, um because it just seems like, yeah, I feel, as you say, there we we've only explored, even with the technology that we have, which um perhaps better, is somewhat limited.
01:31:03
Speaker
um a small part of of what we could find out. um Yeah, what are you interested to find out next? Yeah, so what we're starting to do more recently is something called Precision FMRI, which is a way in which you can scan the same person many times until recently, we've only scanned, let's say, each person for an hour, and then we scan 40 people and we try to understand something about the group rather than the individual.
01:31:33
Speaker
because one hour of scanning for an individual doesn't give you sufficiently noise-free data. But one of the more recent developments in in your imaging is to actually scan the same person many times, like you bring them back for 10 hours of scanning, and then maybe you only scan 10 subjects that intensely.
01:31:52
Speaker
But you can actually now understand how the different networks of this one individual are situated in their brain. And so one of the things that we're beginning to do, which I'm really excited about, is starting to study the default network. And it turns out that when you do this at the individual level,
01:32:08
Speaker
There are, in fact, two default networks that we thought were the same one before, um that we don't actually understand how they differ. And so one of the things that we're going to try to do in the next the following years in in my lab is to understand how the two different default networks at the individual level relate to conscious experience and relate to unconscious processes that are feeding into conscious experience.
01:32:38
Speaker
So to give you a quick preview, it looks like from some findings that are coming out from um outside of our lab, from Randy Buckner's lab, it looks like um there's these two default networks and one of them tends to be more involved in more spatial navigation and and more imagination of um kind of scenes when you imagine yourself being in a place, right?
01:33:06
Speaker
or you think about having been in a place in the past, whereas the other network, and we're still trying to understand it, um we think has to do with extracting meaning out of experiencing. So oftentimes the meaning we extract is some kind of a social meaning. So many cases that network is activated when people think about other people and think about mental states. But there seems to be these interesting ah possible division within the default network and if you scan them on individual level you see actually two completely different networks that are overlapping at a cortical level ah between thinking about space thinking about environment and thinking about mental states or people.
01:33:49
Speaker
which usually think about mental states when we think about people. And so um I think that that's one of the things I'm most excited about, which goes back to what we began with at the beginning. How do we convert experiences that we have into things that are meaningful, into ah models of the world, into ah understandings and beliefs and biases, my beliefs beliefs are kind of biases that will help us make decisions about our lives in the future. And so this is what I'm excited about doing is trying to understand how the interactions, the two different default networks may help us translate our ah experiences from life into things that are that we call meaning, that we call
01:34:33
Speaker
understanding so it's one thing to have experiences you know it's not a thing to understand what these experiences mean and i think that's one of the most exciting things to try to unpack because mostly most of the mind-wandering and most of the spontaneous thought we do is, I believe, for the purpose of extracting meaning out of our experiences. And we can't really understand spontaneous thought without going back to why we have it. And so that's that's one of the things that we're going to do. The other study that we're going to begin specifically looks at um the experience of meaningfulness. So when people feel meaningfulness in life or they feel that some experience is meaningful, oftentimes that's understood in terms of the conceptual
01:35:17
Speaker
uh meaning behind it but what we're interested in is how people feel meaning meaningfulness how people feel it as an emotion and that's going to we're going to try to look at what parts of the brain are involved in the feeling of meaning as a as an emotion rather there is a oh that makes sense right right right right yeah wow those are really interesting um and it's it sounds like we're gonna have even more ideas about the structure of mind-wandering spontaneous thought um from these. mean what i'm my My vision of the brain now is I'm just thinking, yeah, consciousness is just like this this small room within this
01:36:00
Speaker
very big house. And it can kind of look peer through doors and and, and put its ear against the wall and, and try to figure out what's going on elsewhere. And fMRI is is one of the techniques where we can sort of ah no bootstrap that and try to try to look through the walls a little bit. um So yeah, just want i think of consciousness, I think of it in terms of layers, right, like more like I don't know if you want to think of an onion or of a like even a tree as it grows, like consciousness is like the leaves of a tree. But there's also branches, there's ah there's also roots that you don't even see the roots, right? And the leaves can change with the seasons, ah but there's the roots remain and there's ah there's this organic way in which
01:36:47
Speaker
If you just study the leaves, which is what we're doing, we're studying consciousness, we're not really understanding the whole organism and the whole mind. The whole mind is a tree. And if consciousness are the leaves, then we're just really, we can understand a lot about how the leaves are structured and why they turn, you know, how they turn color and how they fall and grow again. But we're not understanding, you know, the function that they serve in this tree because we don't even we're not even studying the whole mind. And that's how I think of it is I think of it as a layer, that if you actually look beyond that layer, you're starting to understand a lot more about the whole mind, but also about that layer itself. Brilliant. Yeah, I love that analogy. Well, um this has just been such a ah wonderful and appropriately wandering conversation. um Yeah, Kalina, Kristoff, thank you so much for for coming on. I've really enjoyed this.
01:37:46
Speaker
Yeah, and thanks so much James for having me and for doing this podcast.