Study Focuses On Our Lack Of Focus

Does your mind trail from its focus often? Perhaps five, ten percent of the time? More? If you're anything like the students at the University of North Carolina, that number is probably around 30 percent, shows a new study to be published in July's Psychological Science.

Psychologists tracked 124 students, paging them eight times a day between noon and midnight too see what they were doing and how focused they were. They found that, on average, students' were thinking about something other than what they should have been focusing on about a third of the time, although results varied widely, with some reporting almost no wandering and others reporting near constant wandering.

Not surprisingly, thoughts strayed most when students were bored, fatigued or stressed. In general, students reported thinking about everyday things rather than fantasies or worries.

A side study designed to test whether the brain's "working memory" found no correlation between a subject's ability to remember lists of words while engaged in other tasks and how much their mind wandered.

Read more: Mind Wanders Much of the Time