Ezra Klein

I think so.

So what is it and what do we know about it?

Well, the wandering mind is just what's happening when you're bored.

That's the precondition in a way for a wandering mind.

It's like, I've got nothing to do.

There's no task here.

I'm just killing time.

And suddenly we're off and daydreaming or mind wandering.

They're very similar things.

I forget how Kalina distinguishes them, but she does.

She thinks it's a really important part of life that we haven't studied because it's not productive.

and that all the work in psychology goes into productive areas of thought.

I think that's changing now.

You have people studying awe and emotions that are not necessarily productive, but awe is very useful.

She just thinks this is a space of creativity and that a lot of creative thinking comes out of mind-wandering and daydreaming.

It's something novelists do all the time.

They get pretty good at daydreaming.

She says we've lost this.

You know, the space of our interiority for this kind of thinking is diminished because of our distractions, our technological distractions.

I think it... Oh, I think it is very productive.