Why does our mind wander? New study taps into the tricks of staying on task

By Jordan Wehrman, Post-Doctoral Researcher, School of Psychological Sciences, University of Sydney

You’re sitting at your desk, writing a short story. You remain focused but after several hours, you still can’t see how to end it. So you go for a run, allowing your thoughts to run with you. Instead of stumbling on a rock, you fall onto a solution.

Sometimes, problems do not have obvious answers. The “eureka” solution comes when we are not expecting it, when our mind wanders. But what causes our mind to wander? What about running lets us come up with an answer that sitting at our desk does not?

While we often think of mind wandering as detrimental,

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