The Restless Mind: Mind Wandering, Perceptual Decoupling and Meta-awareness
Thursday July 24, 2025 | 3:00pm PST
We have all had the experience of reading and suddenly realizing that although one’s eyes have been moving across the page, one’s 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.
About Jonathan
Jonathan Schooler, PhD, is a Distinguished Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of California Santa Barbara, Director of UCSB’s Center for Mindfulness and Human Potential, and Acting Director of the Sage Center for the Study of the Mind. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1987 and then joined the psychology faculty of the University of Pittsburgh. He moved to the University of British Columbia in 2004 as a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Social Cognitive Science and joined the faculty at UCSB in 2007. His research intersects philosophy and psychology, including the relationship between mindfulness and mind-wandering, theories of consciousness, the nature of creativity, and the impact of art on the mind. Jonathan is a fellow of several psychology societies and the recipient of numerous grants from the US and Canadian governments and private foundations. His research has been featured on television shows including BBC Horizon and Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, as well as in print media including the New York Times, the New Yorker, and Nature Magazine. With over 280 publications and nearly 50,000 citations he is a five time recipient of the Clarivate Analytics Web of Science™ Highly Cited Researcher Award and is ranked by Academicinfluence.com among the 100 most influential cognitive psychologists.