Time Mind Wanders During Waking Hours

From StatWiki

"During waking hours, people’s minds seem to wander about 30 percent of the time, according to estimates by psychologists who have interrupted people throughout the day to ask what they’re thinking. If you’re driving down a straight, empty highway, your mind might be wandering three-quarters of the time, according to two of the leading researchers, Jonathan Schooler and Jonathan Smallwood of the University of California, Santa Barbara."

"...[Dr. Schooler], and other researchers have also studied the many other occasions when readers aren’t aware of their own wandering minds, a condition known in the psychological literature as "zoning out." (For once, a good bit of technical jargon.) When experimenters sporadically interrupted people reading to ask if their minds were on the text at that moment, about 10 percent of the time people replied that their thoughts were elsewhere — but they hadn’t been aware of the wandering until being asked about it."

[edit] Source

New York Times article Discovering the Virtues of a Wandering Mind which refers to the study For Whom the Mind Wanders, and When: An Experience-Sampling Study of Working Memory and Executive Control in Daily Life by Michael J. Kane, Leslie H. Brown, Jennifer C. McVay, Paul J. Silvia, Inez Myin-Germeys, and Thomas R. Kwapil, and another study by Jonathan Schooler and Jonathan Smallwood of the University of California, Santa Barbara.