Our conscious minds are fluid and powerful. But, they do have limits and as "Incognito" by David Eagleman shows, they tend to come into use after other parts of us have been working on an issue. You may know about mindfulness, which is being aware of what is on the conscious mind. I ran into the name Dr. Elizabeth A. Stanley, a faculty member at Georgetown University and an advocate of meditation to sharpen one's mindfulness. Her book, "Widen the Window" is about handling stress and trauma.
My picture of meditation to increase awareness of what is occupying and preoccupying one's mind is mostly about concentration on a focus. Such concentration and dedication to a focus vastly increases awareness of having wandered off the focus, whether it is a visual or body focus such as one's breath. Reading her book the other day, I came across her comments about research on mindwandering, more or less the opposite of steady focus. The only book I have found on mindwandering is "The Wandering Mind" by Michale Corballis, a retired professor of psychology at New Zealand's University of Auckland. As is often the case, I have read some of his book but it has been a while since I read any of it.
It turned out that some comments made by Stanley and by Corballis both related to the result of distracted mindwandering. Some work on randomly checking with adults about whether they were on task as they were supposed to be or off mentally wool-gathering implied to Stanley that focused thinking produced more happiness than mindwandering, while Corballis considered the research less definitive. The more complete checking, rechecking and widespread comparison about human nature, habits and reactions as typified by this article:
has been labeled by some as a replication crisis where certain "laws" or foundational suppositions about human behaviors come into serious question when it is discovered that some groups or societies don't behave in a way that Western psychologists assumed everyone must. The processes of creating a fetus, bearing a child and living as a youngster and adult is vastly complex and as Eagleman tries to show, proceeds in many ways outside of conscious deliberate thought. You have probably heard of evolution and The Origin of Species (1859), the book usually credited with a deeper and stronger concentration on where we come from and what makes us be as we are. Maybe some focus and some mindwandering mixed in the right proportions is optimal until we get better insight.
