Attention · about 4 minutes
Where Were You?
The last room took something out of your experience without your noticing. This one is going to catch you doing it to yourself.
Below is a passage about the drainage of the Zuiderzee. It is not interesting; that is deliberate and we apologise sincerely. Read it properly -- and every so often, without warning, we are going to interrupt and ask you one question.
The question is always the same: at the moment just before we interrupted, was your mind on the text, or somewhere else? Answer honestly. Nobody is marking this and the answer nobody expects is the interesting one.
Probe 0 of 4
Right then -- where were you?
Your sampling
Roughly half of your life
In 2010 Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert did something that had not been practical before smartphones: they built an app that pinged thousands of people at random moments through their ordinary days and asked what they were doing, what they were thinking about, and how they felt. They collected around a quarter of a million samples.
People's minds were not on what they were doing 46.9% of the time. Not during one dull task -- across everything, all day, at every activity they measured but one. It is close enough to half that you may as well remember it as half.
That is a startling amount of your waking life to be somewhere other than where you are. And you do not experience it as absence. You do not feel yourself leave, you rarely notice you have gone, and the noticing -- when it happens -- is itself the moment of return.
The unwelcome half of the finding
They also asked how happy people were. Minds that had wandered were reliably less happy than minds on task -- and this held even when the wandering was to pleasant topics. Time-lagged analysis suggested the wandering came first and the dip followed, rather than unhappy people simply drifting more.
Which is an awkward result, because mind-wandering is not a malfunction. The same default-mode machinery does your planning, your rehearsing of difficult conversations, your remembering, your imagining of futures, and a good deal of what people call creativity. It is arguably where you do the work of having a life rather than merely a present moment. It just does not seem to feel very good while it is running.
Why this belongs in a museum about consciousness
The previous two rooms showed you gaps in what you noticed out there -- a change you couldn't spot, a gorilla you looked straight through. This one is stranger, because nothing was missing from the room. You were.
And notice what it does to the idea of a continuous conscious self. You were conscious throughout -- vividly so, if you were rehearsing an argument or planning dinner. But you were not conscious of here, and the part of you that would have reported on the last thirty seconds of Dutch land reclamation had nothing whatsoever to report, because it wasn't running.
The pages went by. The eyes moved. Somewhere behind them, the lights were on in a different room entirely. Exhibit № 22 makes the case that your brain builds whole worlds when the input is unplugged. This is the same generator running with the input still connected, and simply ignored.
Which raises the question this building keeps circling. If you can be absent from half of your own life without noticing the absence, how confident should you be about the parts you think you were present for?
Take it further
The study is Killingsworth & Gilbert, A wandering mind is an unhappy mind (Science, 2010) -- two pages, and among the most quoted results in modern psychology. Jonathan Schooler's work on "meta-awareness" is the best source on the strangest part: catching yourself wandering is a separate act from wandering, and people are often mind-wandering without knowing it, which makes self-report a rickety instrument for the very thing it is measuring.
One honest note about our six probes: real experience sampling pings you at random across days of ordinary life, not during a deliberately tedious passage chosen to make you drift. Our numbers are not comparable to theirs, and were engineered to catch you. If you stayed on task throughout, that is a perfectly good outcome and mostly tells you the passage was shorter than your patience.