Shadowing the wandering mind: how understanding the mind‐wandering state can inform our appreciation of conscious experience

The mind‐wandering state illustrates two fundamental aspects of consciousness: its generative nature, which is reflected by the stimulus‐independent content of thought that occurs when our minds wander; and metacognition, the unique capacity of the mind to reflect and understand itself. Self‐generated thought, which allows us to consider people and events that are not present in the immediate environment, and metacognition, allowing us to introspect and report our inner experiences, are both essential to the scientific study of mind‐wandering. Nevertheless, they also inevitably lead to specific issues that mirror more general problems in the field of consciousness research. The generative nature of consciousness makes it difficult to have direct control on the phenomenon, and the act of introspecting on inner experience has the potential to influence the state itself. We illustrate how the field of mind‐wandering research can overcome these problems. Its generative nature can be understood by triangulating the objective measures (such as neural function) with subjective measures of experience and it can be manipulated indirectly by varying the demands of the external environment. Furthermore, we describe candidate covert markers for the mind‐wandering state, which allow the phenomenon to be observed without direct interference, minimizing the concern that instructions to introspect necessarily change conscious experience. WIREs Cogn Sci 2016, 7:233–246. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1392 This article is categorized under: Philosophy > Consciousness Neuroscience > Cognition