Study: A Wandering Mind Reveals Mental Processes and Priorities

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120315161326.htm

"In both tasks, there was a clear correlation. 'People with higher
working memory capacity reported more mind wandering during these simple
tasks,' says Levinson, though their performance on the test was not
compromised.

The result is the first positive correlation found between working
memory and mind wandering and suggests that working memory may actually
enable off-topic thoughts..."

"Working memory capacity has previously been correlated with general
measures of intelligence, such as reading comprehension and IQ score."

"Where your mind wanders may be an indication of underlying priorities
being held in your working memory, whether conscious or not, he says.
But it doesn't mean that people with high working memory capacity are
doomed to a straying mind. The bottom line is that working memory is a
resource and it's all about how you use it, he says. 'If your priority
is to keep attention on task, you can use working memory to do that,
too.'"

Seems to support anecdotal evidence that intelligence is a hindrance to awakening in that it supports the wandering monkey mind.

"anecdotal evidence that intelligence is a hindrance to awakening in that it supports the wandering monkey mind" - sunyata

What anecdotal evidence of that? I've never heard of intelligence being a hindrance! What have you heard?

Just to add - if you are implying monkey mind is a hindrance to awakening, no, I can't imagine how it could be. It is a common hindrance in *meditation* in early stages, and thus can be discouraging to beginners, but it generally ceases to be a problem after a certain stage, where thoughts are no longer experienced as distractions but merely as yet another perception/sensation, no more or less important than other things being experienced.

That is, ones relationship to thoughts changes with practice.

I've read before that intelligence can hinder progress if intelligence is used to make things more complex than they need to be or if it is used to collect concepts.

When thoughts are experienced as just another perception/sensation, is this the Witness mode I hear about? Are they distractions when they lead you away from your point of concentration? So in Witness mode, they're still there, you see them clearly, but you don't follow them all over the place?

The thoughts do stop at some point though don't they? That's further down the road I guess.

Why do you want them to stop? This is a useful question to think about.

Here's something I just wrote about it, I'd love feedback from others on whether this makes sense or not. It's a bit off the top of my head, but I think it reflects my experience and that of several people I talk with regularly:

Ones relationship to thoughts changes radically over the course of contemplative practice. When one starts out, thoughts often seem to be the major impediment to being able to meditate. One sits, hoping to find some kind of inner silence, and instead there is just this flood of thoughts. One is pretty sure meditation is supposed to be about having a silent mind, so one tries desperately to suppress the thoughts. Funny how that doesn't work. Beginner's instructions in many traditions suggest using some kind of verbal or physical trick such as counting to ten, feeling the breath come in and out of the nose, or praying out loud to help generate some focus on the present moment.

After some months of daily practice, one usually finds that sometimes one drops into a kind of focused state and is less distracted. Other days distraction bubbles up again, especially if there is something exciting or stressful going on at work or in the family. The more one practices, the more this ability to drop into focus becomes natural and easy. And then something interesting happens. One starts to realize that thoughts are just another mental activity, like seeing, hearing, or being aware of body sensations. You can't sit there with your eyes open and not see, right? (Unless, of course, you are actually blind.) The eyes just operate by themselves. The visual centers of the brain just run by themselves. You don't need to do anything to see. It just happens automatically.

Then you start to realize thinking works the same way. Thoughts just bubble up from their mysterious source in the brain, wander through awareness, and disappear. You don't know what the next thought will be. Thoughts just come and go by themselves.

And in my experience the deeper one goes the less thoughts are an obsession like they were in the beginning. One begins to experience more and more time in which one is simply being with experience in a more immediate way and in phases where the mind is busy, the activity of the mind is just more fodder for meditation. It becomes more and more evident that normal daily functioning is not reliant on having a little voice chattering in your head, nor do your thoughts define who you are. Thoughts are not a problem. They are just a natural activity of the mind, just like breathing is a natural part of body function.

In time (particularly after awakening) the familiar inner narrative does tend to fade, and long periods of stillness become more and more prominent.

All this to say, don't obsess about trying to stop thinking. Just do your practice, and the "problem" of thoughts will take care of itself.

And yet I think I'd (for research purposes if nothing else) actually love to know why it is that so many people want "to stop thinking". What is it about the thoughts that is loathesome, bothersome, or troublesome?

Excellent summation, Ona-- all I would add is that sufficient 'stillness' can be found at the heart of the 'full castastrophe' that it literally makes no difference whether conceptuality [thoughts] are doing their thing or not. It's being disturbed [or infatuated] by the content-- and making war on it [or making love to it] that creates problems.

I asked Ngak'chang Rinpoche once, when he was describing the 'enlightened version' of the various elements/emotions/senses whether there was even an enlightened version of thinking [considered a sense by Tibetan Buddhism]. He replied-- "Of course: poetry!" It struck a little spark that I've been protecting and nurturing ever since...

Nice Kate. Yes, the stillness co-exists with the thoughts. But that's not easy to notice until quite advanced practice? It wasn't for me, anyway. Or, I didn't notice it per se, but it was probably what was happening when I began to realize it didn't matter if there were thoughts or not.

Thanks for the feedback. I may rewrite it as a blog post later.

Shunyata, I'd also agree with the researchers about the potentials of the wandering mind: the name for it is 'associative thinking', and to this capacity we owe a great deal of what we've called genius.

Various meditative traditions have decried 'empty-mind meditation' as being 'stone buddha' or 'marmot meditation' or 'pushing the pause button.' All that is required, is to stop the thinking long enough to see that you CAN, and develop the skill to not be doing it compulsively 24/7; to be a driver, not a passenger.

And yet I think I'd (for research purposes if nothing else) actually love to know why it is that so many people want "to stop thinking". What is it about the thoughts that is loathesome, bothersome, or troublesome?


-ona

I guess what I'm suspecting is that people don't want to stop thinking, per se, but don't want to think about particular things. They don't want to think about things that worry them, or things they are afraid of, or things they hate, etc. Those thoughts are so obssessive that one imagines the only way not to think about "bad things" would be to eliminate thinking.

But I think that's a little like wanting to chop your hand off because you keep biting your nails. The problem is the anxiety, not the fingernails.

I was thinking that "non-thinking" or "no thoughts" is a regular stop along the meditation highway, that's why I asked that. Gary Weber claims to think very little throughout the day -- usually 20 minutes after waking and that's it. And then "no thought and no image" is an advanced meditative state in Zen, although I'm pretty sure it can found across traditions...that's just Zen's term for it.

So maybe in some cases people's preoccupation with stopping thoughts is because they read about such states and then using their intent try to evoke them. But the key I think is to let them develop naturally. Maybe for some people they are looking for an escape from mental chatter, but others I think just see that as an end goal in meditation and try to force their way there.

I agree with your thoughts Ona. I guess what follows is kind of what you are saying and a little different.

I think there are two kinds of "thoughts" that we deal with while sitting.

1. Thinking. Something pops into one's mind -- feeling, image, memory, impulse and then one actively pursues it -- reflecting, ruminating, fantasizing, etc.

2. those images, impulses etc. that just naturaly keep popping up in a brain -- sometimes rapidly, sometimes very slowly, sometimes pleasant, soemtimes irritating. If one doesn't chase after these things, then, I don't see that as "thinking."

So, mostly, meditation like a lot of us do is a process of stopping the former, number one. And, in just letting the latter, number two, happen all on its own with no interference. With practice, this can lead to a very quiet, still mind most of the time and it's pretty great, isnt' it? And, yes, in a way I think that is what some zen people think zazen is all about while others I am certain see zazen as living with whatever is happening (monkey mind or not) as a way to really see one's true nature as it really is and not in some ideal.

I imagine Gary Weber is saying that he doesn't do much of number 1 in given day. And, probably, if he is really into pratice his mind might be pretty quiet a lot of the time so he doesn't even get much of the dream of images, etc.

Weird, but this is one of the most fascinating things about meditation to me. what the mind does -- bidden and unbidden. I've often found that once mind mind starts to "quiet" I'll realize that there is a whole other bunch of busy stuff going on behind the curtain that I didn't notice. And, when THAT layer of thoughts/busy mind quiets down, there is still another bunch of stuff going on. Sometimes if feels like there are conversations/dramas/stories/movies going on up in there all the time that I'll hear if and when I just tune in. ( I know that sounds schizophrenic but it doesn't feel like a problem)

Isn't Garry Weber the guy that talks a lot about getting away from "selfing" or something like that? I bet he finds "thinking" to be not so cool because he probably sees it as a self-centerd activity.

I think when people say "thoughts" they generally refer either the onrunning inner narrative (it's like closed captions, as if you might miss out on experience unless you verbalize it): "Damn, I forgot to buy toothpaste. Gotta call Greg and ask about the car repair. I wonder what time Joe gets home from school? Shit, I'm going to miss my appointment. Come on, drive! Go, you idiot! What are you sitting there for? I'm late! Come on! Oh right, get tuna, get ketchup. Ow. Why do I always bump my knee on the door getting out of the car. Fucking door." and so forth. I currently have far less narrative than I used to, but that's actually a fairly recent development (last couple months), as far as I recall. It stopped bothering me, however, quite early in my practice - I remember the exact moment I realized I didn't hate the inner narrator, because it was only then that I realized how much I had hated it before.

Or they are meaning the fantasizing, playing scenes in your head from the past, or imagining scenes from the future. Sometimes these are a kind of emotional dwelling, such as replaying a frightening scene or imagining something unpleasant. Sometimes they are planning: if you have a presentation to give or a meeting, you might practice in your head what you will say by imagining being there. Either way these can kind of run off into really emotionally complex stories. For example I used to constantly imagine having a dangerous accident while driving a car. Highlights were usually the car I was driving falling apart or running out of control (as if it had a mind of its own) and plunging off the road. Or coming upon an accident and trying to help the injured people, usually unsuccessfully. Both were just emotional dramas relating to childhood stuff, and they literally stopped happening quite suddenly after a couple years of meditating.

Now when I sit here adding up numbers for my tax filing, am I thinking? I don't know. I don't think that's *not* thinking. But it's just adding up numbers, stopping once in a while to ask a question or look something up. What about when I practice something I'll need to say tomorrow (in a foreign language) by running the conversation through my head? That way I figure out which vocabulary I don't know and can look it up in the dictionary or make some notes so when I'm at the meeting I make myself more clear. That's a kind of thinking, too, isn't it? But none of these are like the kinds of thinking above...

Thoughts? (!!!)

never mind, cross posted

Yes, I think so.

One can go quite a while without reflective type thinking as I described before without being dead or sedated. I'm not sure if it is possible to have one's brain not produce some kind of activity for any length of time sans engagement/reflectionm

The formatting capabilities of this hosted forum site suck, don't they? Once you copy and paste anything from elsewhere it seems the ability to further edit that text is gone, just gone. Pretty much like Ramana Maharshi's "me" thoughts, I guess.


-cmarti

Agreed. What I usually do is copy the text I want to post, and pasted it into a Gmail message draft. I then highlight the text and use the "remove formatting" function. Then, I paste it into the message. It's tedius, but it satisfies my need to control

along the same lines-- lest we diss 'stories', thinking they're impediments to practice:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-neuroscience-of-your-brain-on-fiction.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1

I love the explicit connection to 'developing compassion'!