Streamlining your 'monkey-mind'

Mindwandering: How It Can Improve Your Mood and Boost Your Creativity 

Author: Moshe Bar

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Price: Rs 599

Moshe Bar is a cognitive neuroscientist with a PhD from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He has written a fascinating book that would interest various kinds of readers — those who are curious about how the mind works, those who simply want to be more efficient at work, and those who want to lead a happier and more fulfilling life.

Dr Bar’s credentials are impressive. 

He was director of the Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital in the US. He headed the Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Centre at Bar-Ilan University in Israel until recently. What is “mindwandering”? Is it more like daydreaming, or getting distracted, or losing track of reality? Referring to “mindwandering” as “a broad term”, Dr Bar clarifies, “The main processes that are believed to make up the content of mindwandering are thoughts about the self, thoughts about others, predicting, planning and simulating possible futures, and more.”

Those who have been to a Buddhist meditation retreat would be familiar with the concept of a “monkey-mind” — a term used to explain how the human mind flits from one thought to another like a monkey jumping from one branch of a tree to another. Teachers use this analogy to help meditators grow aware of how frequently their attention shifts from the present moment either to the past or the future. This background would be helpful to appreciate the book more fully since Dr Bar acknowledges that he has benefited significantly from the practice of Vipassana — a word in the Pali language, often translated as “insight”.

Dr Bar argues that, while “some of our mindwandering is indeed harmful”, not all of it is. Here’s the scientific explanation: “A number of brain regions connected in what’s dubbed the default mode network are always grinding away, engaged in a number of different involuntary activities that neuroscientists collectively call mindwandering: from daydreaming to the incessant self-chatter and from ruminating about the past to worrying about the future.” According to him, the human brain tends to move along a continuum between “exploratory” and “exploitatory” states of mind. The exploratory mind is open to new information and to some degree of uncertainty. We are in an upbeat mood, keen to learn and to create. The exploitatory mind turns to previous experiences to interpret and respond to current situations. It adopts a problem-solving mindset. Our mood is not upbeat. We rely on what is safe and time-tested. Neither of these is inherently good or fundamentally bad. 

This book is not about stopping our minds from wandering; it’s about learning which kinds of wandering can be helpful in a given situation, so that we can witness the workings of the mind and direct it — to some extent — to improve our mood and boost our creativity.

The book is intellectually stimulating and pretty useful even on a practical level. Some of the more exciting, do-it-yourself portions are to be found in the appendix of this volume. Meditation is only one of the tools that Dr Bar looks at. He does not advocate it for everyone because it is important to understand one’s temperament, and find what is most suitable. If you are having the sort of day where getting up from bed seems like a chore and you feel unable to gather the energy to shop for groceries, go to the gym, or even check email, Dr Bar suggests that you “start imagining the upcoming activity in detail” — the shopping list, the bags you want to take, the transport you will use, the market or store where you will go, the flowers you will buy for yourself, and the accomplishment you will feel once you return. This “mental salivation” will make the experience seem closer, with “no buffers and obstacles”.

When your mind is occupied by a thought, Dr Bar recommends that you try labelling it as “positive, negative or neutral” depending on the emotions that it evokes in you.  Another way to label is to ask yourself if the thought is about you, others, or both. This analytical approach can make uncomfortable thoughts seem less overwhelming. You witness them, label, and move on.

Though Dr Bar refers to schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in passing, he does not engage in any detailed discussion of how these experiences affect the mind. While he draws on lessons from Buddhist meditation, he shies away from addressing the fact that, according to the Buddhist worldview, the mind is not located in the human brain. It is a stream that is ever-changing and continues across lifetimes.