Mindwandering

How Your Constant Mental Drift Can Improve Your Mood and Boost Your Creativity

By: Moshe Bar

Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor

Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins

Publisher's summary

Our brains are noisy; certain regions are always grinding away at involuntary activities like daydreaming, worrying about the future, and self-chatter, taking up to forty-seven percent of our waking time. This is mindwandering—and while it can tug your attention away from the present, cognitive neuroscientist Moshe Bar is here to tell you about the method behind this apparent madness.

Mindwandering is the first popular book to explore this multi-faceted phenomenon of your wandering mind and introduces you to the new, exciting research behind it. Bar combines his decades of research to explain the benefits and the possible cost of mindwandering within the broader context of psychology, neuroscience, psychiatry, and philosophy, providing you with practical knowledge that can help you:

• Develop your sense of self, better relate to others, and make associations that help you understand the world around you
• Increase your ability to focus by understanding when to wander—and when not to
• Magnify and enrich your experiences by learning about full immersion
• Stimulate your creativity by combing through the past and making predictions about the future

©2022 Moshe Bar (P)2022 Tantor

Every Mindfulness Meditator should read

This helped me expands my understanding of Buddhist meditation techniques. What this book gives you a is another dimension to mindfulness. While it doesn't dwell into mindfulness meditation in any depth.
It shows you how the mind work. It gets into the underlying mechanism of different ways of how thoughts occur.
So if you had enough experience with mindfulness meditation you can parse out the nuances between focused meditation vs open monitoring vs open awareness practice and the underlying cognitive processes.
Then it also gave me a greater appreciation for the DMN activities.
It helped me understand how the contemplation of Anattha, Anicca, Dukka work. Some Buddhist teachers call it discernment. Discernment requires DMN procesees over a longer period of time for insights to occur.
I wish Moshe Bar had a bit more experience with meditation, to explain this. But he like all other meditators new to it get stuck in the narrow understanding of meditation that most meditation teachers are stuck in.
Still the book is a very worthwhile book. I will be returning to this book to glean more understanding with time.
Two other books that added depth to Mose's thesis is "How Emotions are Made" by Lisa Feldman Barrett and "Positivity" by Barbra Fredrickson. Both research scientists speaking about their domains.

Genius author

My bullshit indicator says that this book is 100% pure genius.
Interesting solutions to deal with unwanted thoughts.
This book inspires me to be a better person.
I don’t feel bad when my mind wanders anymore :)
I got more tools to control difficult mental situations and hopefully I’ll be able to help a friend or two :)
Thank you Moshe bar for sharing your genius inspiring work with the world.
Waiting for your next book.

A step into neurodivergence.

I heard good information about this book and it’s relatable content, so made the effort to listen.
Though the insight was informative, it felt more like a personal journey speaking to the authors own struggle with mind wandering and his efforts to harness his story. It also seemed to drag in parts as it seemed he was trying to match points of contextual information but got a bit lost in his own explanation.!
At times it seemed less relatable to me as a listener.
Overall interesting content was okay, though not sure if it’s a book for everyone.