Insights from quiet minds

the converging fields of mindfulness and mind-wandering

Michael D. Mrazek

Benjamin W. Mooneyham

Jonathan W. Schooler

pp. 227-241

in: Stefan Schmidt, Harald Walach (eds), Meditation, Berlin, Springer, 2014

Abstract

Our lives are filled with an endless array of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings, and our attention usually darts back and forth between them. Yet meditative traditions have long valued the capacity to remain undistracted from our immediate experience, and countless individuals make a practice of stabilizing their awareness in the here and now. What are the implications of anchoring our usually restless minds? Could stabilizing our attention provide an informative lens into the dynamics of the human brain? Here we review recent research that situates mindfulness as an opposing construct to mind-wandering and a remedy for wandering minds. We then review empirical intersections between mindfulness and mind-wandering from recent neuroimaging studies.