<story><title>Tuning out: How brains benefit from meditation</title><url>http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-11-tuning-brains-benefit-meditation.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jessriedel</author><text>Then what evolutionary purpose do you think mind-wandering serves?  We clearly tend to think about various current problems of ours (whether technical, social, or other) when our mind wanders; it&apos;s not an accident.</text></item><item><author>aik</author><text>I&apos;ve pondered the same thing.  However, personally from meditation I feel I have greater focus, a clearer mind, and less stress (or a much better handle on stress), which I couldn&apos;t imagine being without today. Concerning shower-insights -- I find myself having less mind wandering in the shower, and instead more deliberate focused insights.</text></item><item><author>jessriedel</author><text>The real question is whether it&apos;s a good thing to stop &quot;mind wandering&quot; when it hasn&apos;t reached the level of disorder.  From the perspective of evolution, it almost certainly has a purpose. Paul Graham pointed out that its probably useful for problem solving:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.paulgraham.com/top.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.paulgraham.com/top.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if it would be good to have the ability to better focus one&apos;s self when one&apos;s mind is wandering into unproductive subjects (e.g. agonizing over an ex) without necessarily getting to the point where your default mode has been changed so much as to prevent insights in the shower (and instead being deeply aware of the hot water).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vidarh</author><text>I don&apos;t agree with this.&lt;p&gt;What you describe is rumination. Rumination has been demonstrated to be beneficial in resolving problems. Depressed people ruminate a lot, and I remember seeing at least one article (don&apos;t ask for a reference - I don&apos;t remember where) that claimed that this was because rumination worked as a tool to get us to focus on resolving a problem.&lt;p&gt;Rumination is an indication of focus, not of a wandering mind, even though it might superficially seem like wandering because we turn to rumination all the time whenever we have &quot;spare cycles&quot; and there is something important on our mind.&lt;p&gt;Meditation might also affect rumination in that it changes your mindset and a lot of the things that you previously thought was massively important and worth ruminating about start turning into inconsequential non-events to you, but that&apos;s entirely separate from reducing &quot;wandering&quot;, and meditation won&apos;t stop you from ruminating on things you really care about (though it might train you to be more focused on &lt;i&gt;when&lt;/i&gt; you do it and not let it cut into your relaxation, for example).&lt;p&gt;But what I at least think of as the mind wandering is the type of random chatter that leads you to go check Hackernews one second because it popped into your head that you hadn&apos;t checked it for five minutes, and leads you to grab a snack the next because you suddenly felt an urge for sugar, and have you sit and blankly dream about that vacation you&apos;d wanted to book a few minutes later.</text></comment>
<story><title>Tuning out: How brains benefit from meditation</title><url>http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-11-tuning-brains-benefit-meditation.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jessriedel</author><text>Then what evolutionary purpose do you think mind-wandering serves?  We clearly tend to think about various current problems of ours (whether technical, social, or other) when our mind wanders; it&apos;s not an accident.</text></item><item><author>aik</author><text>I&apos;ve pondered the same thing.  However, personally from meditation I feel I have greater focus, a clearer mind, and less stress (or a much better handle on stress), which I couldn&apos;t imagine being without today. Concerning shower-insights -- I find myself having less mind wandering in the shower, and instead more deliberate focused insights.</text></item><item><author>jessriedel</author><text>The real question is whether it&apos;s a good thing to stop &quot;mind wandering&quot; when it hasn&apos;t reached the level of disorder.  From the perspective of evolution, it almost certainly has a purpose. Paul Graham pointed out that its probably useful for problem solving:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.paulgraham.com/top.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.paulgraham.com/top.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if it would be good to have the ability to better focus one&apos;s self when one&apos;s mind is wandering into unproductive subjects (e.g. agonizing over an ex) without necessarily getting to the point where your default mode has been changed so much as to prevent insights in the shower (and instead being deeply aware of the hot water).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pnmahoney</author><text>&lt;a href=&quot;http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=search.displayRecord&amp;#38;uid=2009-10379-009&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=search.displayRecord&amp;#38...&lt;/a&gt; This seems to bear on the implied point here: that mental focus on a problem -- perhaps unconsciously -- can be reflected in our neurobiology. (Or vice versa? Not sure whether this should be a response to P or GP)</text></comment>