The recent surge of scientific research into mind-wandering has occurred amidst a definitional haze. ‘Mind-wandering’ has been used to refer to a wide range of mental phenomena, from attentional lapses to purposeful, task-unrelated planning; from free-flowing thought and creative idea generation to highly constrained, perseverative rumination. Should we continue to group these disparate phenomena under the umbrella of ‘mind-wandering’ despite the lack of scientific consensus on what mind-wandering is and what it is not? Or should we treat ‘mind-wandering’ as a scientific concept in need of a rigorous theoretical definition that distinguishes it from other types of thought?
