JUL 2025 Guest Speaker: Jonathan Schooler
Jonathan Schooler: 2025 Guest Lecture Series | JULY
TITLE: The Restless Mind: Mind Wandering, Perceptual Decoupling and Meta-awareness
We have all had the experience of reading and suddenly realizing that although oneâs eyes have been moving across the page, oneâs minds has been entirely elsewhere. The experience of thinking about something completely different from what one is reading illustrates some fundamental aspects of the mind. First it demonstrates how readily our minds can become disconnected from what is going on around us (perceptual decoupling). Second, it illustrates how easy it is to fail to recognize that this has happened (loss of meta-awareness). In this talk, I will discuss research on mind wandering that illuminate the perceptual decoupling and loss of meta-awareness that it implicates. I will consider a host of behavioral measures (e.g., self-reports, comprehension performance, gibberish detection, fidgeting) and physiological measures (e.g., evoked response potential, EEG, eye movements, fMRI) that have been helpful in elucidating mind-wandering. Finally, I will explore some of the techniques that have been developed to help to minimize the disruptive effects of mind wandering.
Free
