...Alcohol tweaks mind wandering in a particularly interesting way, as Schooler and his colleagues report in a new paper entitled "Lost in the Sauce," published in Psychological Science...Drunk readers actually reported less mind wandering than sober people did. That does not mean that you should swill vodka if you want a laser focus on Tolstoy’s deathless prose, though. Schooler has shown that there are, in fact, two kinds of mind wandering: mind wandering when you are aware that you’re thinking about something else and mind wandering without awareness. He calls this second kind zoning out...
...These experiments show that we spend about 13 percent of our time zoning out. But when we are drunk, that figure doubles. In other words, inebriated subjects report less mind wandering only because they are less aware of their own minds...
...Even more telling is the discovery that zoning out may be the most fruitful type of mind wandering...
Is it just me, or did that article conclude that getting drunk doubles the time you spend thinking on big picture problems and increases your ability to solve them, although you're not aware of it and in fact may look like a total idiot when it comes to doing immediate, short-term thinking?
I know I'm overgeneralizing, but I find the connection fascinating. I know I have observed and experienced a propensity for long-term thinking after moderate consumption of alcohol. Not sure if any of of that thinking does much good though. And from reading the article, I am finding that the amount of that thinking is probably a lot more than I (or others) realize.
...These experiments show that we spend about 13 percent of our time zoning out. But when we are drunk, that figure doubles. In other words, inebriated subjects report less mind wandering only because they are less aware of their own minds...
...Even more telling is the discovery that zoning out may be the most fruitful type of mind wandering...
Is it just me, or did that article conclude that getting drunk doubles the time you spend thinking on big picture problems and increases your ability to solve them, although you're not aware of it and in fact may look like a total idiot when it comes to doing immediate, short-term thinking?
I know I'm overgeneralizing, but I find the connection fascinating. I know I have observed and experienced a propensity for long-term thinking after moderate consumption of alcohol. Not sure if any of of that thinking does much good though. And from reading the article, I am finding that the amount of that thinking is probably a lot more than I (or others) realize.