When the Pixies released their hit song “Where Is My Mind” in 1988, they could hardly have known what a hot research topic the wandering mind would become. Nor could they have imagined how controversial mind-wandering could be.

Cognitive scientists are currently in a debate about whether mind-wandering is good for us or not. Until recently, the evidence has suggested that mind-wandering is actually bad for us and makes us unhappy. Yet mind-wandering is such a natural part of how our brains work, that our thoughts wander about half of the time. …

Coltan Scrivner is morbidly curious about morbid curiosity. He studies what makes people interested in violence and horror, trying to understand what people get from engaging in ‘recreational fear,’ by watching true crime shows or horror movies.

But when the novel coronavirus spread, he started wondering whether people who were already into zombie apocalypse or pandemic movies reacted differently to the pandemic. “My collaborators and I had already been discussing the idea that people who play with scary things might learn how to cope better with scary things in real life,” Scrivner, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago…

It’s a familiar visit in my pediatric office. The frustrated parent brings their child to see me because they won’t go to school. The young person, usually a pre- teen or adolescent, has been increasingly anxious about school. And now, the child can’t even get up in the morning, so the missed days of school are piling up.

Parents usually try one of two techniques when facing a child who won’t go to school. They try insisting on it, which is when their child accuses them of being harsh and insensitive to how bad they feel. Or they try letting…

Doctors have been worried about this for a long time, and now it’s starting to happen. As the Covid-19 vaccine has started to become available beyond health care workers, people are starting to refuse to take their shot. If people won’t take the vaccine that could end the coronavirus pandemic, what comes next?

One of the most common reasons people develop fears of vaccines has to do with a common misunderstanding about side effects. But what most of the public doesn’t know is that doctors who have been vaccinated against Covid-19 were delighted when the vaccine gave them symptoms.

When…

It’s surprisingly old school.

Marie Banich has spent her career trying to understand how the brain works with information. She has also noticed that some of her anxious relatives have a way of getting stuck on a thought and not being able to move on from it. “People have these thoughts they can’t get rid of,” Banich told me. “I wanted to know if there are mechanisms for getting rid of those thoughts that are going around and around on virtual repeat.”

Now a new study by Banich of the University of Colorado Boulder, Jarrod Lewis-Peacock of the University of…

Ruth had always been told she was hypersensitive and she needed to grow a thicker skin. No one was ever going to see her as a leader unless she learned to “never let them see you sweat.” But Ruth could not help sweating the small stuff, and even so, had developed a reputation for being a great problem solver.

In good news for those who have been called hypersensitive, researchers have found that people who showed a more intense response to stress before the Covid-19 pandemic were less likely to experience PTSD after it started. …

Mindfulness has been embraced as the modern answer to stress. In fact, there in a solid body of evidence to back up the claim that mindfulness helps with stress. But until now, few have asked how mindfulness impacts the experience of stress in the moment.

When researchers at the University of Buffalo set out to study this, they expected to find that people who practiced mindfulness would have a more positive experience when exposed to acute stress. Instead, they found the opposite. People who were more mindful actually experienced more stress, and it showed up in measurements of their cardiovascular…

Innovators have a way of being interested in everything. In childhood they were always getting called on by their teachers for being distracted. If we could listen in on their thoughts, it might go, “Ooh, a squirrel. Hey, look at that! Shiny.”

In a culture that sells us on the idea that success comes from a focused pursuit of our one passion, innovators have a way of forgetting to focus. Instead, they play with a range of interests. It’s nicknamed the ‘squirrel method.’ In adulthood, innovators still find themselves distracted by shiny objects or passionately chasing squirrels. …