In 2010, two Harvard psychologists, Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert, published a study in the journal Science that has, in the decade and a half since, become one of the more widely cited pieces of empirical research on the texture of contemporary human life. The study used a smartphone application called Track Your Happiness, which pinged participants at random moments throughout their days, asking them what they were doing, what they were thinking, and how they were feeling. The participants were drawn from the wider population. The study collected roughly 250,000 data points across 2,250 subjects ranging in age from eighteen to eighty-eight.
The headline finding of the study was a specific number. The participants spent 46.9 percent of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they were actually doing at the moment of the ping. The figure has, since its publication, been rounded in popular accounts to 47 percent. The figure has become one of the more durable pieces of empirical data on the wider human condition. The figure is, on close examination, considerably more interesting than the standard cultural framing has tended to credit.
The standard framing tends to treat the figure as evidence of a problem to be solved. The figure suggests that adults are, on average, not particularly present in their own lives, and the wider self-help and wellness register has spent the last fifteen years calibrated to addressing this problem through mindfulness, meditation, and various adjacent practices. The standard framing is not wrong about what the figure suggests. The framing is, however, missing what the figure is structurally telling us about the underlying condition.
What the figure is, more specifically, measuring
It is worth being precise about what the 47 percent figure is actually measuring, because the popular accounts have not, on the available evidence, preserved the precision particularly carefully.
The figure is measuring what cognitive scientists call mind-wandering. In the Killingsworth and Gilbert framework, mind-wandering refers to the experience of thinking about something other than what one is currently doing. The mind-wandering can be directed toward pleasant topics, neutral topics, or unpleasant topics. The wandering can involve memory of past events, anticipation of future events, or pure fantasy about events that have not occurred and may never occur. The defining feature of mind-wandering is, more specifically, the structural separation between what the body is doing and what the mind is attending to.
The figure is also measuring something more specific than the popular framing tends to allow for. The 46.9 percent is the average across all activities. The actual rate of mind-wandering varies considerably depending on the activity. The study found that people mind-wander most when in the shower and least when they are having sex. Other activities fall somewhere between these two extremes. The variation suggests that mind-wandering is not, in any meaningful sense, evenly distributed across waking life. The wandering is, more accurately, the default condition that the apparatus falls into when the current activity is not sufficiently engaging to fully occupy attention.
The structural implication of this is that the default condition of human consciousness, in adult life, is mostly somewhere other than the present. The present is, more specifically, the place consciousness goes when the current activity has captured enough of its attention to override the default. The default is the elsewhere. The override is, by the available evidence, less common than the default.
What the underlying capacity is, on closer examination
The capacity for mind-wandering is, on close examination, what cognitive scientists call the default mode network. The network is a particular set of brain regions that activates automatically whenever the brain is not engaged in any specific external task. The network is, in some real way, what the brain defaults to doing when nothing else is demanding its attention. The network is what produces the mind-wandering that the Killingsworth and Gilbert study was measuring.
The wider implication of this is that the 47 percent figure is not, on close examination, a feature of any particular failing on the part of the participants. The figure is, more accurately, a feature of how the human brain is structurally organized. The default mode network is doing what it was evolved to do. The doing involves, by structural design, the temporal projection of consciousness away from the present moment and toward various past, future, and hypothetical scenarios. The capacity for this projection is, on the available evidence, one of the defining features of human cognition. The capacity is what allows for planning, learning, memory consolidation, social reasoning, and the various other forms of mental work that depend on the ability to think about things that are not currently happening.
This is, in some real way, the structural fact that the standard self-help framing has not adequately preserved. The mind-wandering is not, in itself, a defect. The mind-wandering is, more accurately, the structural feature of a particular kind of cognitive apparatus that has, by evolutionary design, prioritized the capacity to think about the non-present over the capacity to remain continuously focused on the immediate environment.
What the cost actually is
The cost the Killingsworth and Gilbert study identified is, on close examination, a specific cost rather than the generic unhappiness the popular framing has tended to imply.
The cost is that mind-wandering is correlated with reduced happiness. The study found that participants reported feeling happy only 56 percent of the time when their minds were wandering, compared to 66 percent of the time when they were focused on the present. The correlation held across activities, including activities that the participants would otherwise have rated as pleasant. The mind-wandering itself was producing the reduction in happiness, regardless of what the participants were ostensibly doing.
The study also addressed the question of causality, which is structurally important. The standard cultural assumption would be that unhappy people mind-wander more, with the wandering being a symptom rather than a cause. The Killingsworth and Gilbert data, on close examination, supported the opposite causal direction. The participants’ happiness at one moment was strongly predicted by whether they had been mind-wandering in the previous sample. The participants’ happiness was not predicted by whether they would be mind-wandering in the next sample. The asymmetry is the structural evidence that mind-wandering causes unhappiness, rather than the other way around.
The implication of this is that the 47 percent figure is, in some real way, a measure of how much of waking life is being spent in a configuration that the available evidence has established is, on average, less pleasant than the alternative. The configuration is the default. The default is producing a small ongoing cost in subjective well-being. The cost is small in any single moment. The cost, accumulated across the roughly half of waking life the wandering occupies, is considerable.
What this implies about the present
The wider implication of all this, on close examination, is that the present moment is, in some real way, structurally underrepresented in the average adult’s actual experience of being alive. The adult spends approximately half of waking life thinking about something other than what is currently happening. The half that is spent in mind-wandering is producing, on average, lower happiness than the half that is spent in present-focused attention. The wider experience of being a contemporary adult is, accordingly, more pervasively elsewhere than the wider register has been treating it as.
This is, in some real way, what the contemplative traditions have been pointing at for several thousand years. The traditions have been suggesting that the present moment is where the substantive material of being alive actually occurs, and that the various practices the traditions have developed are calibrated to producing more time in the present than the default would otherwise allow for. The empirical research is, more or less, supporting this claim. The traditions were, on the available evidence, correct about the underlying structure.
The research is also, however, more honest than the traditions about the underlying difficulty. The mind-wandering is not, on close examination, an optional feature of adult cognition. The mind-wandering is the default condition that the brain reverts to whenever the current activity is not sufficiently engaging to override it. The practices that would reduce mind-wandering are, accordingly, practices that work against a structural default rather than practices that simply remove an obstacle. The work is harder than the standard framing tends to imply, and the gains are, in most cases, more modest than the marketing of contemporary mindfulness suggests.
The acknowledgment this article wants to leave
The 47 percent figure is, on close examination, one of the more interesting empirical findings about the texture of contemporary adult life. The figure documents that the average adult spends roughly half of waking life thinking about something other than what is currently happening. The figure also documents that the mind-wandering is, on average, producing a small ongoing cost in subjective well-being relative to the alternative of being focused on the present.
The wider cultural register has, on the available evidence, absorbed the figure in two unhelpful ways. The first way is to treat the figure as a problem to be solved through mindfulness practices that, on close examination, are working against a deeper structural default than the marketing has been acknowledging. The second way is to dismiss the figure as a counsel of perfection that the wider population could not realistically implement.
The more honest framing, on close examination, is that the figure is documenting a structural feature of human consciousness that the species has, by evolutionary design, been operating with for as long as the apparatus has existed. The feature has costs. The feature also has benefits, in the form of the capacity to think about the non-present that makes most of distinctively human cognition possible. The trade-off is what the species is, and the trade-off is, in some real way, what the figure is measuring. The mind is mostly elsewhere. The mostly-elsewhere is, on the available evidence, what the mind is structurally for. The wider implication is that the present moment is, more accurately, a particular kind of cognitive achievement that the apparatus is, by default, not particularly calibrated to produce. The producing of more of it is available. The producing is harder than the standard register has been acknowledging.
