Hi, I'm Cody Gough.

And I'm Ashley Hamer.

We're from Curiosity.com, and we've got three stories to help you get smarter in just a few minutes.

Today, we'll talk about why your mind wanders, how your dog understands you better than you think,

and Richard Branson's secret to productivity and success.

Let's satisfy some curiosity.

All right, listener, I want you to do something. Clear your mind. Think of absolutely nothing. You can even put this on pause for a second. We'll wait.

Okay, are you done? Great. What went through your head? Probably not nothing. You probably

thought about a lot of things. A lot of random stuff, maybe some song lyrics,

maybe what you want to eat for dinner, and that's really normal. You're saying it's normal to think

of something when you're told to think of nothing? Yeah it's actually really hard to

think of nothing and that's because a wandering mind is actually your default mode.

Literally, that is what scientists call it.

You can't turn off your brain basically?

Pretty much. You can turn off your brain, but it takes a lot of effort. Your natural state is your brain going all over the place. Curiosity researched this, and scientists have known that the brain does this for a lot longer than they've actually been able to identify it.

So in the early 1900s, when scientists would do brain studies,

they would have people think of nothing as the control, right?

And then when they would have them do something there would be brain activity

but they noticed that when they had them do nothing there was a bunch of activity in their

brains and they didn't really know why and they sort of chalked it up to like a mistake or they didn't really they're like

whatever that is that's not what I'm studying right now so I'm gonna ignore it and then in the

1970s there was a Swedish researcher named David Ingver who was like,

...