They tell us that attention is very powerful in terms of affecting our perception, and things like stress and mind wandering diminish its power. But that's all in the context of these very controlled laboratory settings. What about in the real world? What about in our actual day-to-day life? What about now? Where is your attention right now? I'd like to make a prediction about your attention for the remainder of my talk. You will be unaware of what I'm saying four out of the next eight minutes. Now, why am I saying this? A growing body of literature suggests that we mind-wander. We take our mind away from the task at hand about 50 percent of our waking moments. And when this mind-wandering happens, it can be problematic. Now, I don't think there'll be any dire consequences with you all sitting here today, but imagine a military leader missing four minutes of a military briefing, or a judge missing four minutes of testimony. The consequences in those cases could be dire. So one question we might ask is, why do we do this? Why do we mind-wander so much? Well, part of the answer is that our mind is an exquisite, time-traveling master. We can rewind the mind to the past to reflect on events that have already happened. Right? Or we can go in fast-future to plan for the next thing that we want to do.
