Scientists: Put Down Your Devices and Let Your Mind Wander



People frequently underestimate how much they would prefer to spend time alone with their thoughts and nothing to divert them, according to study from the American Psychological Association.

According to research main author Aya Hatano, Ph.D., of Kyoto University in Japan, "humans have a surprising ability to immerse themselves in their own thinking." "Our research indicates that people have trouble understanding how entertaining thinking can be. That may help to explain why individuals would rather use gadgets and other forms of entertainment to keep themselves occupied than pause for thought and creativity on a regular basis.

In a series of six studies involving a total of 259 people, the researchers compared people's estimates of how much they would enjoy simply sitting and thinking with their actual experiences of doing so. In the first experiment, participants were asked to evaluate how much they would enjoy having 20 uninterrupted minutes to themselves, free from any interruptions like reading, moving around, or looking at a smartphone. Afterward, people expressed their satisfaction with it.

Researchers found that respondents valued their own time for reflection much more than they had thought. This held true whether participants were asked to report their enjoyment during the task rather than at the end, whether the thinking period lasted three minutes or 20 minutes, and regardless of whether participants were seated in a sterile conference room or a small, dark tent area with no visual stimulation. Participants consistently reported that they enjoyed thinking more than they had anticipated.

In a different experiment, the researchers compared how two sets of participants anticipated they would like thinking and how much they would enjoy reading the news online. Again, the researchers found that participants overestimated their enjoyment of thinking. Despite the thinking group's assumption that it would be far less fun than the news-checking group, both groups later reported similar levels of satisfaction.

According to research co-author Kou Murayama, PhD, of the University of Tübingen in Germany, these findings are particularly significant in our contemporary day of information overload and easy availability to distractions. "These days, it's really simple to pass the time. You can check your phone instead of becoming lost in your own free-floating thought while riding the bus to work since you believe contemplating will be boring, the speaker stated. But if that forecast is wrong, you're losing a chance to actively engage yourself without the need for external stimulus.

The researchers claim that this lost chance has a cost because prior study has revealed some advantages of letting your thoughts wander. It can aid in problem-solving, the development of the creative mind, and even the search for purpose in life. People risk missing out on these significant advantages by purposefully avoiding thinking tasks, according to Murayama.

It is significant to notice that participants did not evaluate thinking as a task that they found to be particularly delightful, but rather that they found it to be more fun than they had anticipated. On a scale of 1 to 7, participants' satisfaction levels ranged from 3 to 4. Murayama recommends further investigation into the sorts of thinking that are most stimulating and delightful. He claimed that not all thinking is naturally satisfying and that certain people are prone to negative thought cycles.                                                                                                                  
According to the researchers, future studies should look into the causes of people's misconceptions about how much they will enjoy thinking. Additionally, the findings must be replicated in groups that are more varied than those in the current study, in which every participant was a college student from the U.K. or Japan.                                                                                                                    
By AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION 

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