The reason your mind wanders has nothing to do with discipline or willpower, and a study of 68 experiments found that the longer any task goes on, people increasingly think about something else regardless of how hard they try

The reason your mind wanders has nothing to do with discipline or willpower, and a study of 68 experiments found that the longer any task goes on, people increasingly think about something else regardless of how hard they try

Most people assume a wandering mind is a discipline problem — that if you concentrated harder, it wouldn’t happen. A large body of attention research says otherwise, and the case against the discipline explanation has become difficult to ignore. A meta-analysis published in Psychological Bulletin, led by Anthony P. Zanesco and co-authored by Ekaterina Denkova and Amishi P. Jha of the University of Miami, pooled data from 68 studies and nearly ha…