Human minds often wander. Whether we’re busy at work, doing chores or exercising, our thoughts frequently shift away from the task at hand. These spontaneous thoughts sometimes turn toward sensations in the body, such as our heartbeat or breath, and that could affect our immediate emotional state and long-term mental health, researchers report March 25 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Many studies focus on thinking about memories, events and other people, what scientists consider the cognitive aspects of mind wandering, says Micah Allen, a neuroscientist at Aarhus University in Denmark. This research suggests that mind wandering plays an important role in planning, learning, creativity and other important mental processes. It has also been linked to negative emotions and some, such as obsessively ruminating on past mistakes, may contribute to depression, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and other mental illnesses.
But how the mind might drift to bodily sensations, what some researchers call “body wandering,” and its effects have largely been overlooked, Allen says.
He and colleagues had 536 people lie still in a magnetic resonance imaging scanner and then complete a questionnaire about what was on their minds during that time. In addition to the typical content of daydreams, such as memories, plans or social interactions, participants reported paying attention to sensations in their body, such as their breathing, heartbeats and bladder. The team also found evidence of this in the MRI scans: Body wandering appeared to have a distinct brain signature from that of “cognitive” mind wandering.
The questionnaires showed that the more people reported engaging in body wandering, the more likely they were to report feeling negative emotions during the MRI. Study coauthor Leah Banellis, a neuroscientist at Aarhus University, notes that the negative emotional experience of body wandering may be unique to the small, enclosed space of an MRI scanner. But evidence exists that this relationship holds outside this specific context. One 2024 study in which people were asked to track experiences via smartphones throughout the day also found that body focus was associated with negative mood.
On the other hand, participants who reported more body wandering overall appeared to have fewer symptoms of depression and ADHD, the questionnaire results showed. In other studies, both conditions have been linked with higher-than-average levels of traditional, cognition-specific mind wandering and impaired interoception, the ability to connect to one’s bodily sensations. These findings suggest that being in tune with one’s internal sensations may protect against certain harmful patterns of thinking, the authors say. And while experiencing negative emotions at a given moment might coincide with increased body wandering, over time, a tendency to engage with bodily signals may have a more grounding or protective role, particularly for individuals prone to negative rumination or attentional difficulties, Banellis says.
“This is a rigorously done study that characterizes a new, interesting, aspect of mind wandering,” says Daniel Smilek, a neuroscientist at University of Waterloo in Canada who was not involved in the work (but has collaborated with one of the study’s coauthors in the past). Like Banellis, he notes the study’s unique setting—within the confines of an MRI scanner—and says it would be useful to examine how people “body wander” while carrying out different tasks throughout the day.
A key limitation of this study is that participants’ inner thoughts were probed only once, after the session was complete, says Aaron Kucyi, a neuroscientist who was not involved in the work but peer-reviewed the study. “We know from research on mind wandering that it’s dynamic, it varies over time and that happens differently in different individuals,” says Kucyi, of Drexel University in Philadelphia.“A cross-section, single measure that tries to summarize all their experience in that time could be missing out on the nuances.”
Even so, this work makes an important contribution to the field, Kucyi says. Until now, researchers studying interoception and mind wandering have largely lived in separate worlds, but these findings will most likely encourage those two groups to begin integrating their work, he says. “I think it’s going to be influential.”
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