The Wandering Mind: What the Brain Does When You're Not Looking

It's pretty likely. In fact, some studies suggest that we spend as much fifty percent of our waking life failing to focus on the task at hand. But does that represent a problem? Michael Corballis doesn’t think so, and with The Wandering Mind, he shows us why, rehabilitating woolgathering and revealing its incredibly useful effects. Drawing on the latest research from cognitive science and evolutionary biology, Corballis shows us how mind-wandering not only frees us from moment-to-moment drudgery, but also from the limitations of our immediate selves. Mind-wandering strengthens our imagination, fueling the flights of invention, storytelling, and empathy that underlie our shared humanity; furthermore, he explains, our tendency to wander back and forth through the timeline of our lives is fundamental to our very sense of ourselves as coherent, continuing personalities.

Full of unusual examples and surprising discoveries, The Wandering Mind mounts a vigorous defense of inattention­—even as it never fails to hold the reader’s.   

Michael C. Corballis (1936–2021) was professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Auckland. His books include The Recursive Mind: The Origins of Human Language, Thought, & Civilization (Princeton) and A Very Short Tour of the Mind: 21 Short Walks around the Human Brain.