Mind wandering is to find as when we're not focused on what we're doing,

when we're thinking about something else other than a present time task.

So right now you're sitting here listening at a Buddhist center if your mind was thinking

about tomorrow or something that happened earlier in the day than your mind would be wondering

but if you're thinking about what I'm saying or how weird

I'm looking or whatever, that would not be mind wandering because you're thinking about a present

time task that you're engaged in. So thinking about stuff around you isn't mind

wandering. Mind wandering is when we go into what's called representational thought, when we're no longer in reality. We're

representing the world in our mind and I'm putting my hand up here because it's

actually the left hemisphere that does that.

There was an amazing study that was done by two great psychologists,

Killingsworth and Gilbert at Harvard, and they did a famous study called A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind, one of the more lucidly titled clinical research papers.

It was of now 5,000 people in 83 different countries, so it's pretty much the largest clinical research that I've ever heard of. And they found, what they did is they literally got people,

programmers in Cupertino to build an app that would randomly

essentially ping iPhone and other phone users,

smart phone users, and they would answer essentially whether they were

focused on what they were doing or not focused on what they were doing, what activities

they were doing, and whether they were happy or not,

whether they felt in a positive or negative or neutral mood.

So they found out some very interesting things they find out that people are notably less

happy, significantly less happy when their minds wander than when their minds are focused on what

they're doing.

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