This past July, Science published a paper with an alarming conclusion: most people would rather give themselves an electric shock than be alone with their thoughts. A slew of news stories followed, seizing on this dramatic evidence of our inability to be content without external distractions. “I was surprised that people find themselves such bad company,” Jonathan Schooler, a University of California, Santa Barbara, psychologist, who was not involved in the study, told the Boston Globe.
The University of Virginia psychologist Timothy Wilson and his collaborators began the study with a simple question: When our minds turn inward, “is it a pleasing experience”? In recent years, psychologists have become increasingly engaged with the question of how the mind swivels its lens on itself, a phenomenon they have variously called mind-wandering, daydreaming, and the brain’s “default mode.” Wilson was particularly interested in whether people enjoy silent contemplation isolated from all diversions.
He and his colleagues asked four hundred and nine college students to each sit alone for six to fifteen minutes in a sparsely furnished, windowless room, and to entertain themselves with their thoughts. When their bouts of rumination were over, the students rated their enjoyment and boredom on a scale from one (not at all) to nine (extremely), with a midpoint of five (somewhat). To account for the possibility that the barren room was a downer, other students were asked to do the same at home. And to control for college students’ presumed attachment to cell phones and other portals to distraction, Wilson and his team recruited sixty-one other participants between the ages of eighteen and seventy-nine, from a Methodist church and a farmers market. These variables appeared to make little difference. Whatever their environment, age, or engagement with technology, participants gave their enjoyment and boredom middling ratings, hovering between four and six. A majority of participants actually rated sitting and thinking as somewhat enjoyable or higher.
Wilson and his colleagues interpreted these ratings as evidence that “most people do not enjoy ‘just thinking.’ ” But then, to test how far participants would go to escape their own thoughts, they designed a new experiment. Forty-two college students each sat alone in a room with their ankles hooked up to a machine that could deliver an “unpleasant but not painful” electric shock, akin to the static twinge of shuffling, sock-footed, across a carpeted floor and grabbing a metal doorknob. Once again, participants were asked to lose themselves in happy thoughts, but this time they could zap themselves. Twelve of eighteen men and six of twenty-four women gave themselves between one and nine shocks. One man jolted himself a hundred and ninety times.
Wilson and his team said they were surprised by the results, but their interpretation was decisive. “Being alone with their own thoughts for 15 min was apparently so aversive that it drove many participants to self-administer an electric shock,” they wrote. “People prefer electric shock to thinking,” tweeted the Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, one of Wilson’s co-authors. But there is no direct evidence for these claims. On average, participants rated their fifteen minutes of contemplation slightly below the midpoint of “somewhat enjoyable,” and those who zapped themselves did not rate being alone with their thoughts as significantly less agreeable than those who refrained. Some participants likely regarded the contraptions—to which, after all, they were attached—as a mild temptation or a moment’s amusement. And who’s to say someone can’t enjoy a little daydreaming punctuated by an electric thrill or two? Perhaps, rather than offering a respite from thought, the shocks stimulated new ideas or steered thinking in new directions.
Both the researchers and the media portrayed the students as faced with a binary choice: either sit and think or shock yourself. But mandating that people sit still and forcibly birth amusing thoughts into existence does not at all reflect how we spend time with our thoughts in everyday life. When we want to retreat into our own minds, most of us do not instinctively assume the lotus position or retire to some austere chamber. Rather, we occupy ourselves in ways that allow our brain to turn inward: by listening to music, strolling through the park, going for a run. At other times, the brain enters a state of daydreaming without our conscious coöperation, especially during rote activities like washing the dishes or brushing our teeth. With our bodies anchored to well-rehearsed actions, our minds can drift away.
When the mind begins to explore itself, Wilson and his co-authors conclude, “it may be particularly hard to steer our thoughts in pleasant directions and keep them there.” Gilbert has previously argued that the “human mind is a wandering mind, and the wandering mind is an unhappy mind.” Yet we all know from personal experience that daydreaming can awaken our happiest memories and animate our fantasies. A wealth of research further demonstrates that, just as disciplined meditation has immense benefits for mood, concentration, and memory, everyday mental downtime helps the brain rehearse what is has recently learned, replenishes our reservoirs of attention, and delivers some of our great creative insights. We often discover the solution to an unsolved problem precisely when we allow our attention to wander away from it, shifting the workload to the powerful machinery of our subconscious.
Perhaps most troublingly, proclaiming that we’re unable to enjoy our own thoughts suggests that our mental weather is always supposed to be pleasant. But unhappy thoughts often serve the same purpose as bodily pain, alerting us to problems that need to be resolved before they get worse. The human mind is not meant to resemble a postcard from paradise forever fixed in a state of tropical bliss. It’s a vast and perplexing wonderland whose entire topography can change in an instant. We could try to navigate that inner world in a way that circumvents the unpleasant and irksome. Or we could face the looking glass, press through, and wander.
