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What Is Mind-Wandering?
Dr. Jonathan Schooler • 2026-06-02
Dylan Carnahan:Welcome to the Simple Questions Podcast. This is your host, Dylan Carnahan. The question for this episode is, what is mind wandering? You will learn in this episode, techniques that help with mind wandering, how to distinguish between deliberate and spontaneous drift, and the mechanics of how mental drift generates breakthroughs. Our guest is the director of the MetaLab, Memory, Emotion, Thought and Awareness at the University of California, Santa Barbara. A pioneer in the scientific study of mind wandering, meta awareness and consciousness, and whose peer-reviewed research on consciousness, memory and mind wandering has been cited more than 35,000 times. I introduce to you Dr. Jonathan Schooler. It is 2.30 in the morning when I wake up. I'm drenched in sweat. It's a hot summer night. I walk downstairs, and I get a glass of water. As I'm drinking, I have an idea. I should start a podcast. But I don't really know what it would be, and I think a little bit further. I think, well, I'll just ask simple questions. And I think that's a good enough premise. And then I come to the branding part, which is what do you call that? And I thought, well, let's keep it simple. Kiss Method, The Simple Questions Podcast. That was six years ago. Now, I think of that moment not because of the fact that we're on The Simple Questions Podcast, but because there were a lot of underlying mechanisms for what transpired there. So sometimes I go back and I think of that. Dr. Schuller, how did you first become interested in consciousness and mind-wandering?
Dr. Jonathan Schooler:I think I've been interested in mind-wandering my whole life. My first grade report card began when I think of Jonathan, I imagine him at the end of the line, five feet behind everybody else, shoes untied, completely preoccupied and yet totally content. So I've been a mind-wanderer my entire life. And so I think it's sort of natural for me to dive into mind-wandering. I come by it naturally.
Dylan Carnahan:Now, it's one thing to be labeled in such a way, it's another thing to actively pursue, you know, an understanding behind that. What was the shift or can you maybe elaborate on that?
Dr. Jonathan Schooler:Yeah, well, I was also, I think, always or at least since my teenage years, interested in consciousness. My father gave me a book by Alan Watts when I was 14, the book on the taboo against knowing who you are. And that really sort of opened my interest in, in consciousness. And then, well, everyone in my family are academic psychologists, so it was sort of a natural to go into psycho- academic psychology. But once there, consciousness was a sort of a natural direction to go into. And once thinking about consciousness, mind-wandering, given my proclivity for it, was also a natural consideration. And one of the things that I was really interested in that sort of stood out to me about the mind-wandering experience is how we can mind-wander without noticing that we're mind-wandering. So for example, you're reading, and you routinely had the experience of reading and suddenly realizing that my eyes were moving across the page, but my mind was completely lost for that I, and I knew, I know that I can't read and think about something completely unrelated, and yet I do it all the time, which really sort of indicated that I could lose track of what was going on in my own mind. So, so mind-wandering seemed to be a really sort of interesting avenue into thinking about some of the key aspects of consciousness, and particularly the fact that we don't necessarily know what's going on in our own minds. And then suddenly we do a phenomena that I've referred to as meta awareness.
Dylan Carnahan:Can you elaborate on meta awareness?
Dr. Jonathan Schooler:Yes. So meta awareness, the idea is that it's the intermittent taking stock of what's going on in your mind. So when I'm mind-wandering and not realizing it, I'm lacking meta awareness. When I have this sudden moment of, oh, geez, I've been mind-wandering instead of reading for the last couple of minutes, that's the moment of meta awareness. And the idea is that we're only periodically meta aware, which is perhaps for the better, because if you're both having a thought and thinking about the fact that you're having a thought, that's two things you're trying to hold in your mind at once, and it can be disruptive. But if you're intending to be thinking about one thing, and you're thinking about something completely unrelated, then meta awareness can be quite useful. The idea is that it's something that's helpful as a corrective, but can impede thinking if it happens too much or is constantly going on.
Dylan Carnahan:I'm going to propose a different route, because I think it's important to clarify this. In talking about mind wandering and the meta awareness of it, I would propose what's the alternative from a wandering mind?
Dr. Jonathan Schooler:Well, so mindfulness, where you're really grounded in the present, and your thoughts are explicitly on whatever you're doing, at least if those thoughts are focused on the external world, that would be the opposite of mind wandering. In neuroscience, they give people tasks to do, and there's a set of brain networks, the executive network and salience network, that are especially engaged when you are doing a task. That's called the task positive network. And then there's another network associated with what's known as the default network, which is engaged when there's nothing to do, when you're just sitting in the scanner without any activity. But also, if you're doing a task and you mind wander, then you also see activation of this default mode network. So basically, it's possible to be very present doing a task, and it's also possible to be mind wandering, where you've drifted away from the here and now.
Dylan Carnahan:What is the potential purpose or biological purpose of mind wandering?
Dr. Jonathan Schooler:Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, one of the interesting things is that we mind wander all the time. Estimates go from 25 to 50% of the time we're mind wandering. I think the 50% estimate is large. But a significant proportion of the time we're drifting away from the present moment. And also, as I mentioned, this is called the default mode network, because it seems to be sort of the primary sort of brain activity that's going on when there's nothing pressing to do. And so what is the value of it? Well, there are a number of things that seem to be associated with a mind wandering that might be helpful. It's associated with planning, with thinking about the future. So if you don't have a whole lot to do in the moment, you can sort of plan, well, what am I going to be doing next? It's associated with what's known as current concerns. So if there are particular issues or problems that you need to sort of sort out in your life, mind wandering allows you to sort of reflect on those. And something that I'm especially interested in, it seems to be associated with creativity. About 20% we did a study looking at creative writers and physicists, and about 20% of the creative ideas that they had happened not while they were at their desk, not while they were actively pursuing the problem, but when they were in the shower, taking a walk, doing gardening. So it seems to be sort of an opportunity to let the mind sort of drift and stumble onto ideas that it might not otherwise have, or for sort of unconscious percolations to pop up.
Dylan Carnahan:The focus in on the benefit of creativity. I'm just curious, how did you quantify creativity and how does that interact with mind wandering?
Dr. Jonathan Schooler:Yeah. So it's, it is quite hard to quantify creativity. But there are ways of doing it a variety of different ways. In that particular study that I was referring to with the physicists and the writers, we allowed participants to define it for themselves. So at the end of every day, we asked them, did you have any creative ideas today? And then what was the context under which you had the idea? But then as a sort of further validation that the idea really was a creative, we contacted them again several months later and said, hey, remember that idea? How creative do you think that was now? And so that sort of gives them the opportunity to go, well, you know, it still feels creative to me. So that's the way that we studied it there. In other cases, we had people come up with, and this is a sort of standard measure, unusual uses for common objects, such as a brick or a hanger. And in one condition, we had people come up with them and then take a break that was filled with a non-demanding task, which allowed for mind-wandering, or a demanding task, or just to sit there without any task at all, or we didn't give them a break. And then we gave them the opportunity to think about additional uses for that object. And what we found is that when we gave them the non-demanding task, that was the situation in which they came up, they got the greatest benefit from this break period, suggesting that having absolutely nothing to do may not be even the best situation, that something just a mildly engaging task, such as taking a walk, taking a shower, gardening, maybe sort of a sweet spot for enabling you to feel occupied, but not so occupied that the mind can't wander.
Dylan Carnahan:It's interesting to hear too, you talk about that total absence of something to do doesn't necessarily have as profound of an impact as say being somewhat occupied.
Dr. Jonathan Schooler:Yeah, you know, people don't really like having absolutely nothing to do. There was some research by my colleague Tim Wilson, where he had people just sit idly, and there was the opportunity to shock themselves. And a significant proportion of people were so bored by just having to sit there, that they actually would shock themselves just to give themselves something to do. So I think that people sort of feel when they're just sitting there, that they're just inadequately engaged, and they feel the need to... It's not conducive to productive mind-wandering because they're just thinking, I am so bored.
Dylan Carnahan:There are a couple of things I want to delve into, but I'll go with what you just last said, which is productive mind-wandering. Can you define that for us?
Dr. Jonathan Schooler:Well, so if you're just engaging in negative rumination about an experience that you wish you... Something you hadn't done, and you're just repeating, I wish I hadn't done that. I wish I hadn't done that. That's probably not going to be of a particular value for you. And it's going to cause negative mood and various other things. But if you're engaging in interesting thoughts that you find... that you're curious about, then that can lead to what we refer to as productive mind-wandering, or mind-wandering where you... That might contribute to a creative idea. And we've coined the term mind-wandering as this kind of... As one example of this productive mind-wandering, where you're just playfully, curiously jumping from idea to idea and exploring your curiosity. And that does seem to be associated with... On days in which people are engaging in more curious mind-wandering, they also seem to have more creative ideas.
Dylan Carnahan:I'm going to cut back on you, which is I'm going to go a little bit on the rumination route, right? So again, I want to get to the how to elicit mind-wandering and techniques and so forth. However, I feel like it's important to go back to kind of that negative aspect of rumination. What are some ways that maybe you could curb that?
Dr. Jonathan Schooler:Well, one important thing is getting back to the meta-awareness. Because in the same way that you can mind-wander without realizing that you're mind-wandering, you can engage in negative rumination without realizing that you're engaging in negative rumination. Until you notice that you're doing it, it's very difficult to stop it. The first thing is just catching yourself going, oh, there I go again. Then there are various techniques that people can use. My colleague, Michael Anderson at Cambridge, used to develop this technique of just thought suppression, of just don't think about it. And although there's been some research suggesting that it's very difficult to thought suppress, his recent research indicates that you can just practice when you come up with that unwanted thought, just go, I'm not going to think about that anymore, and just actively try not to think about it. Contrary to some other earlier evidence, that seems to be something possible that one can do. Then there's also other techniques from cognitive behavioral therapy, such as de-catastrophization, where a lot of times the negative rumination is, oh, this terrible thing is going to happen. And most of the terrible things that we worry about end up not happening. So just sort of really thinking about what are realistically, what really is likely to happen here? Is it really as bad as it seems? So there are also some ways of dissecting the rumination and sort of becoming to realize that you're maybe making more of it than is really necessary.
Dylan Carnahan:I'm curious in talking kind of like the metacognitive abilities and how that could maybe be used to disrupt negative mind wandering such as rumination. Could that, does that have any hindrance on something like mind wandering?
Dr. Jonathan Schooler:Can you repeat that question?
Dylan Carnahan:So these metacognitive abilities help kind of potentially disrupt something like rumination. Does that disrupt something like mind wandering?
Dr. Jonathan Schooler:Well, I actually think that metacognition can actually be quite helpful for mind wandering. Because rather than, if you catch yourself thinking about some negative thought that you've been ruminating about, rather than focusing on that negative thought, you can go, you know what? I want to think about something that I'm curious about. Let me think about that podcast I was just listening to. There were a number of things in that podcast that were really cool. I want to reflect on that. So once you catch your mind going down an avenue that you're not thrilled about, that's an opportunity to redirect it to something that you're interested in. And there's so much interesting material to be thinking about and reflecting about and pondering about. So taking that unpleasant noticing of a disturbing rumination and shifting it to something interesting can be a very valuable metacognitive move.
Dylan Carnahan:Thank you for allowing me to kind of navigate the conversation that way. In refocusing on the delineation of mind wandering and bringing out mind wandering, what are some other types of mind wandering?
Dr. Jonathan Schooler:Well, people might wonder about all sorts of different things. They can have a meaningful mind wandering. One thing that is a particularly important distinction is between intentional mind wandering, where you know that you're doing it versus unintentional mind wandering, where you don't and where you're not intending to do it. There's actually a subtle distinction between mind wandering that you're aware of versus not aware of versus mind wandering that you're deliberately engaging in versus not deliberately engaging in. There's some sort of debate in the field about how different those two things are. But the basic idea that sometimes we are deliberately mind wandering, you're in a boring class, it's not really having any value for you, so you're thinking about something more interesting versus you're reading, and you really want to be paying attention, but you just mind wander. That distinction turns out to be very important. And in general, it's the unintentional mind wandering. It's the mind wandering that happens without med awareness that's the most problematic, right? Because when you know you're mind wandering, you're usually doing it at times that are sort of strategic, right? And so it's not going to be as costly. But if you don't know you're mind wandering, then that's a situation where you might be doing it at a time where it could be quite problematic. Furthermore, if you know you're mind wandering, you and are deliberately doing so, you can sort of choose and pay attention to the topic that you're thinking about. So it's more likely to be of the productive type.
Dylan Carnahan:What are, in talking about being intentional, what are some techniques that you found that would help with that intentionality?
Dr. Jonathan Schooler:Well, once again, med awareness, so checking in periodically and taking stock of where your mind is and just sort of cultivating your capacity for noticing the contents of your mind. In that context, meditation seems to be very helpful. And if you've ever meditated, you know it's really a study in mind wandering. Because what happens when you meditate is you're supposed to focus on your breath, right? So your breath is not necessarily all that engaging. So routinely, you discover that your mind has wandered, and then you have to gently bring your mind back to the breath, and then it does it all over again. So in engaging in meditation, what's happening is you're actually practicing, noticing your mind wandering and bringing it back. So that's a very valuable technique for both maintaining focus. So individuals who meditate are better able to just sort of stay focused, but they're also better at noticing when they've lost focus and bringing it back.
Dylan Carnahan:That's such a good example. Personally, that resonates a lot. I just think back to my personal experience and being frustrated with myself, right? And now to kind of put it now in a context where I have a better understanding. I appreciate that. In part of that, in talking about that personal anecdote, it seems like sometimes there's a level of guilt that accompanies mind wandering.
Dr. Jonathan Schooler:Yeah.
Dylan Carnahan:What can you tell us about that?
Dr. Jonathan Schooler:You know, mind wandering has a pretty bad name. You know, I think that, you know, it's associated, of course, with attention deficit disorder, and it's with mindlessness, and with sort of a lack of focus. And so, and I think just in general, society has treated it as something that should be avoided at all costs. And one of our sort of goals in my lab is to sort of rehabilitate mind-wandering to help people to appreciate that actually, it can be a valuable state of mind for engaging in curious reflection and creativity and planning. And that not necessarily is it needed that you be grounded in the present moment at every single time. I think there's a value to sort of letting the mind have a little recess and be playful and curious and go down rabbit holes.
Dylan Carnahan:Yeah, I mean, I just go back to kind of your, you know, the beginning of our discussion, right? It seems like there's a negative stigma around that. And that's not valued by institutions.
Dr. Jonathan Schooler:And understandably also, I mean, mind wandering is associated with all sorts of challenges. People who are deeply engaged in mind wandering while driving are much more likely to have car accidents. As I mentioned before, mind wandering is associated with, maybe I didn't say this explicitly, but not surprisingly, if you're mind wandering while you're reading, you're not going to be comprehending the material as well. And we see real deficits in reading comprehension by virtue of mind wandering. There's research that shows that people even can mind wander while taking tests and they're not going to do as well on the test. In fact, one of the reasons why people do badly on tests is because they were mind wandering during them. I certainly wouldn't want my surgeon mind wandering while they were engaging in operations. So mind wandering can be very problematic. And that's why it's really sort of important to mind wandering at more opportune times and to avoid mind wandering at the less opportune times.
Dylan Carnahan:I'm curious, based upon the research that you've done, is there anything else that you found fascinating in regards to mind wandering?
Dr. Jonathan Schooler:Well, let's see. So one thing is looking at the qualities of what happens when people are mind wandering. So for example, when people are reading, you can look to see what happens to their eye movements when they're mind wandering, versus when they're paying attention. And so when people are reading, there oftentimes is a relationship between the quality of the word and gaze duration. So low frequency words, less familiar words, people stare at longer than the higher frequency words. At the end of a sentence, something called the wrap up, people pause for a moment to make sense of a sentence before moving on. And what we find is if we ping people and ask them, were you just mind wandering or not? That we find that if they were mind wandering, the relationship between their gaze duration and the quality of the word is reduced. So basically, mind wandering interferes with the standard relationship between eye movements and lexical properties that we otherwise see. So this also then provides us with a marker of mind wandering while reading. Another interesting approach that we've taken is to look at two different ways of measuring mind wandering. One way of measuring it is having people press a button every time they notice their mind wandering. So the readings say war and peace, and every time they notice themselves mind wandering, they press a button. And then in addition, we can ping them periodically and go, just now, were you mind wandering? And what we find is that routinely we can catch people mind wandering, before they noticed it themselves. So we can basically catch those unaware episodes of mind wandering. And what we find is that the frequency of unaware mind wandering, so the frequency with which we catch them by the probe before they notice it themselves, that's highly correlated with reading performance, whereas the self-caught mind wandering is less correlated. And this may be because if you are catching your mind wandering, you can repair and you know that you're doing it. But if you're mind wandering without meta-awareness, that's the kind of mind wandering that's likely to be particularly problematic. We also looked at the impact of alcohol on mind wandering. And so alcohol has one of its effects, is reducing meta-awareness of experience in general. And this may be one of the reasons why we enjoy it, right? You may be less self-conscious when you're drinking alcohol, but that also means you may be less likely to notice your mind wandering. And sure enough, when we gave people alcohol, we were much more likely to catch them with the probe mind wandering, and they were less likely to catch it themselves. And this helps to explain why alcohol may be so dangerous, because it sort of packs a one-two punch. On the one hand, you're more likely to have a lapse, and on the other hand, you're less likely to notice it.
Dylan Carnahan:That's also interesting. Unfortunately, I mind wandered for a moment. And there are just a couple of things I'm just really curious about. And I'm going to introduce a topic, and I don't know how well it will resonate, full transparency, which is during the exp... Have you got any feedback on necessarily the experience of mind wandering? And I go back to... I've interviewed and I have someone about aphantasia, which is the inability to conjure images in one's mind's eye, as well as other, you know, senses. I guess, yeah, what are some ways that we could qualify the experience of mind wandering, whether that's, you know, visual or auditory?
Dr. Jonathan Schooler:Sure. We found, for example, that if people are mind wandering and they're mind wandering with words, that they're more likely to notice their mind wandering. So this suggests sort of a relationship between meta-awareness and the verbal code, whereas the visual seems to be less likely to be associated with noticing mind wandering. We look to see if people are looking at visual images, and we then look to see whether or not they're mind wandering while they're looking at the visual images. And then the question is, if they're mind wandering visually, does that interfere more with their memory than if they're mind wandering verbally? And what we found is that indeed, if you're mind wandering while you're looking at images, you're less likely to remember them. So that sort of fits with the standard thing. But we didn't find a relationship between visual versus verbal mind wandering and the interference, which was a little bit surprising, but that's sort of what the data shows. And then we've also looked at sort of the content of mind wandering. What are the topics that people are mind wandering about? And so, for example, we find that creative individuals are, and maybe this is not that surprising, but we found it consistently, that creative individuals are routinely mind wandering about bizarre imagery, bizarre thoughts. So it just sort of stands to reason that individuals who are creative might have sort of more creative mind wandering content.
Dylan Carnahan:No, this is all fascinating, and I appreciate kind of the discussion on the research that you've done. Something else I want to propose, just I'm curious about the implications of some of the things that we're talking about on free will.
Dr. Jonathan Schooler:Whoa, yeah, so free will is a really interesting and thorny topic that I've reflected on to some degree. And we have a couple of findings that are potentially related to the relationship between mind wandering and free will. One is a study looking at meditators, and looking at the impact of a multiple-week meditation retreat on their belief in free will, and also on just how long people have been meditating for and their belief in free will. And what we find is that the more experienced the meditator, the less they endorse they believe in free will. And after this several-week retreat, the less they believed in free will. And we also did a study in which we had participants engaging in a task which either encouraged a lot of mind wandering or a little mind wandering. And then we asked them about the degree to which they felt like they could control their thoughts. And then we asked them about the degree to which they believed in free will and the people who engaged in the task in which they mind wandered a lot, indicated that they had less control over their thoughts and also that they had felt they had less free will than the people who mind wandered less. If you put all that together, it kind of suggests that when people really sort of introspect on the inability to prevent the mind from wandering, that it just no matter how hard you're focusing on your breath, the mind will veer off even if you're an experienced meditator. It sort of it helps to highlight the limits to free will. Now, personally, I think that there's a difference between having a limited free will and having no free will. And oftentimes, the absence of full control over the mind might be interpreted by some as showing, therefore, we have no free will at all. And I think that is an overstatement. And when you look at these measures, it's not, they're not indicating they have no free will, they're just indicating that they have less free will. And I think that's really a valuable way to think about free will. You can sort of think about free will as sailing, right? When you're sailing, you can't control the currents, you can't control the tides, you can't control the wind, the weather. All these things are not in your control. And so there's limits to exactly how much control you have about where your boat's going to go from moment to moment. Nevertheless, you can control the rudder, you can control the sails, and you do have, therefore, some control. And so we sort of have some free will, in my opinion, we have some free will, just not total free will. And I recognize that I'm going against the grain of some of my hard-nosed philosophical and neuroscientist colleagues, but that's the way I see things.
Dylan Carnahan:Full transparency, that's a lot to unpack. I'm grateful that we got to get into that. Yeah, it's just interesting to hear. It's almost like those that have experiences that make them feel like they have limited agency, then that kind of is the outlook that they have.
Dr. Jonathan Schooler:Exactly.
Dylan Carnahan:Wow. Are there any other kind of misunderstandings about mind wandering or potentially just productivity?
Dr. Jonathan Schooler:Well, I think that it's important to recognize the value of finding balance, and that routinely people sort of think in black and white terms, that you should always be mindful, never mind wander, or mind wander as much as you like. It's great. So really trying to understand the nuance of the relationship between a mind wandering and a mindfulness, I think is very important. And I think also people talk about attention deficit disorder as being just this disorder, right? And I think that that is, I think for some individuals, there are aspects of it which can be problematic, but it also can be, their aspects of it can be conducive to creativity. And it's possible that our society has different niches for different individuals, and that people who have a wandering mind, they just need to find the kind of avocations that are well-suited for that style of thinking. And I think more generally, sort of recognizing the way that sort of mental health is treated as, you know, this is a disorder, you're normal, and really just sort of recognizing that we're all on distributions with respect to different qualities. And we're sort of more on the extreme on some and more in the center on others. And I think oftentimes, there is this tendency to sort of demonize a particular cognitive characteristic. So there's another characteristic known as schizotypy, which is sort of engaging in magical thinking. And in the extreme, that can be associated with schizophrenia. But in the more modest levels, it's associated with creativity. It's associated with noticing patterns that other people might miss. And so the tendency to treat these sort of further out on the continuum, aspects of mental thought as necessarily a disorder, I think, is another misunderstanding that could be corrected.
Dylan Carnahan:On a personal note, do you maybe have any suggestions for institutions and organizations regarding the mind wandering?
Dr. Jonathan Schooler:Well, I mean, there are a couple of things. I mean, there are situations where people have really extreme mind wandering. They've actually come up with, I forgot the exact term that they've come up with it. But so in the extreme cases, I think mind wandering can be problematic. I think also that it's really valuable for organizations and for individuals to learn a sort of mental control, right? To foster their capacity for staying grounded in the moment when they need to, under the right circumstances. And in fact, we have a app called Finding Focus that we've introduced. You can find it on the app store that we've introduced into high schools around the country. And we found that high school students who use this app are better able to control their focus, better able to avoid mind wandering when they want to avoid it, such as when they're in class or when they're reading. And it's also associated with increased well-being. So I encourage people to go on to the app store and download Finding Focus. But I also think that recognizing the value of mind wandering, and particularly mind wandering under circumstances where it's not going to be excessively problematic, that that incubation period, it's oftentimes referred to where you're just letting the mind roam freely can be quite helpful. And so I think that giving employees, giving people the opportunity and the respect to engage in playful flights of fancy is really worthwhile.
Dylan Carnahan:I'll pivot to a more general individual level, and I'll broaden this as well. So based upon your research and your knowledge, what advice do you have for the average person?
Dr. Jonathan Schooler:Well what I would say is that you're actually more of an expert on your mind than you realize because you have a front row seat to the goings on of your mind. And I would invite you to really sit back and enjoy that front row seat. Watch your mind jump from idea to idea. Notice when you're mind wandering. Notice when you're engaging in a negative rumination. And take control of it. So recognizing that you actually have a front row seat to your own mind, that you can watch it, that you can control it to some degree, right? You're not going to have complete control. You're going to discover when you watch it that the mind kind of has a mind of its own. But nevertheless, you can sort of set your sail and control your rudder to some degree. And even as you get jostled around by the winds of unconscious thoughts and all the things that come up, when you sort of set a course, you can get closer to where you want to go.
Dylan Carnahan:Well, how can people learn more about you and the work you do?
Dr. Jonathan Schooler:Well, if you just Google Jonathan Schooler, you'll find my web page, which is the MetaLab here at UCSB. And there you'll find all sorts of many of our publications and other podcasts that I've given and news write-ups. And people will also find my contact information and can reach out to me personally.
Dylan Carnahan:Dr. Schooler, thank you for sharing your knowledge and time today.
Dr. Jonathan Schooler:It's been my pleasure. Thanks for inviting me.
Dylan Carnahan:That wraps up our conversation with Dr. Schooler. We talked about how mildly engaging tasks provide the ideal backdrop for productive mind wandering, how meta awareness can be used to stop rumination, and the cognitive impact of alcohol. Go to this episode's show notes to see any resources Dr. Schooler mentioned during our episode. And lastly, subscribe to the Simple Questions Podcast to get notified when our latest episodes are released. Thank you for listening, and remember to keep asking questions.