Why your mind wanders, and why Mindwhere asks
Mindwhere borrows a research method called experience sampling. Here's what it is, what one famous study found with it, and what the app does and doesn't claim.
What is experience sampling?
Instead of asking people to remember how their days went, experience sampling asks them what they're doing and feeling at random moments, as it happens. Memory is kind to some moments and harsh to others. A random sample isn't.
Psychologists have used the method since the 1970s, first with pagers and paper booklets, now with phones.
The study: a wandering mind is an unhappy mind
In 2010, Harvard psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert built an iPhone web app that contacted 2,250 adults at random moments during the day. Each time, it asked how they were feeling, what they were doing, and whether they were thinking about something other than what they were doing. If they were, it asked whether that was pleasant, neutral or unpleasant.
They published the results in Science under a blunt title: “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind”. What they found:
- People's minds wandered in 46.9% of samples.
- Minds wandered at least 30% of the time during every activity except one.
- People were less happy when their minds were wandering than when they weren't, whatever they were doing.
- Drifting to pleasant topics made people no happier than staying on task. Neutral and unpleasant topics made them less happy.
- What people were thinking predicted their happiness better than what they were doing.
- The timing of the answers suggested that mind-wandering was generally a cause of unhappiness, not just a consequence of it.
What Mindwhere measures
Mindwhere asks the attention questions from that study: what you're doing, whether your mind was on it, and if not, whether it was somewhere pleasant, neutral or unpleasant. It leaves out the happiness rating to keep each check-in to two taps.
Pings arrive three times a day at uniformly random moments inside the waking window you choose, at least 90 minutes apart. Your headline number is simply the share of your answers where your mind was on what you were doing. Charts show how it changes over time and how every activity splits across the four answers.
What it doesn't claim
Mindwhere is a mirror, not a treatment. It doesn't diagnose anything or promise to make you happier, and your numbers describe you, not people in general.
Mind-wandering isn't all bad, either: researchers have linked some of it to planning and creative problem-solving. The point is to see your own pattern clearly, then decide what, if anything, to change.
Sources
- Killingsworth, M. A., & Gilbert, D. T. (2010). A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science, 330(6006), 932. doi:10.1126/science.1192439
- Csikszentmihalyi, M., & Larson, R. (1987). Validity and reliability of the Experience-Sampling Method. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 175(9), 526–536.
- Baird, B., Smallwood, J., Mrazek, M. D., Kam, J. W. Y., Franklin, M. S., & Schooler, J. W. (2012). Inspired by distraction: Mind wandering facilitates creative incubation. Psychological Science, 23(10), 1117–1122.
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