Talk:Mind-wandering

Hi Ed, thanks for the help with the entry. Its a great tip to have written off line before sharing it with the community. Thanks also for your nice comments on our work. As I mentioned, we have a psychological bulletin review coming out (we are about to get the proofs) I am going to incorporate that into the entry when its published, I just thought I should get one going. I can send you a copy of the proofs if you are interested. my email is jsmallwood@psych.ubc.ca (I am finishing of a post doc at ubc before going back to aberdeen in a month or so) - feel free to email me if you like .

Hi Jonny, I've now downloaded some of your papers, and I see that you were being modest when you said "several". It's a nice body of work you're doing there, and I think that you should be able to incorporate more of it into the wikipedia article. Just remember to cite your articles, just like anywhere else, and you should be fine Wikipedia:Citing_sources. I think the best thing to do from here is to focus on explaining the concepts to non-specialists. Also, you may want to do a lot of your editing offline and then upload and save changes after major edits. In that way, you can take advantage of spellcheck (typocheck) and you'll avoid what happened with this article, which is that it got RfD'd three times while you were still writing the draft. Otherwise, you can always use preview instead of save, if you just want to see how the article is progressing. Edhubbard 14:20, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Ok Jonny, This entry should now be more like a standard wikipedia article, which should spare you any further RfDs. You'll see that I rewrote the first paragraph, so that instead of being in the second person ("you" and "your") it is now in the third person, which fits better with the idea of neutral point of view. I have also put the keyword at the beginnig of the very first sentence, as is done on most pages. Similarly, the addition of references makes it much less likely that you will face another RfD because you are presenting something that looks like original research. In this case, as you are an expert in this field, you should pay special attention to this section here Expert Editors, which deals with the sometimes complicated relationship between no research and having researchers edit.

There's probably some more stuff that you cand add, clean up, or even correct, but at least this gives you a template to work from. Finally, on talk pages, you should sign your posts with four tildes (~) so that it puts your user name and the time that you posted). You'll find that there are a lot of rules, but the vast majority of them can be understood to be in the service of complete transparancy. Everything we save is recorded, everything we delete is recorded, but then, if there are ever any debates or problems, there is a clear electron trail that people can follow... Happy Wikipedia-ing. Edhubbard 22:02, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

HI Ed

Sounds good. I havent ever made any wikipedia pages so I could sure use all the help i can get.

Jonny

Hi Jon, Nice to meet you. Given that this article has been RfD'd twice, I guess we'd better get to cleaning it up! I'm happy to do a few wikipedia things, so that it can pass muster. Edhubbard 21:07, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

Hi Ed

I am a neuroscientist and a faculty member at Aberdeen University, I have published several articles on mind-wandering in peer reviewed journals, including a review article that is forthcoming in Psychological Bulletin. The article is at the proof stage at the momment, so I didnt want to link to the journal yet. I am actually one of the authors on the APS talk that you mention. I will certainly take your suggestions on board.

J

Hello Jonsmallwood2004,

I am one of the contributors to the attention page, and saw your recent addition of the link to mind-wandering. Several things jump out at me when looking at this entry. As Merope had mentioned, mind-wandering seems to be a neologism. In order to verify, I ran a search in Pubmed, which is the free online listing of all medical sciences articles. My search turned up exactly one hit, with the authors that you mention in your entry.

Mindwandering

A similar search in google turns up exactly the same pubmed site I've referrred to above, and an American Psychological Association symposium on the topic from this year: APA Mindwandering.

So, perhaps the term is catching on, but it doesn't yet seem to be a standard psychological topic.

A search for the first author, Antrobus, turns up substantially more hits in peer reviewed journals: Antrobus at Pubmed but this is somewhat difficult to be certain that this is the same person, given the 13 year gap, and the fact that some articles cite Antrobus, JS and Antrobus, JS as authors. Thus there are two people who seem to work on similar topics (REM sleep and "daydreaming" or "spontaneous thought").

The fact that this term seems to be non-standard English, and that your entry also has multiple grammar and spelling errors suggests that perhaps you are coming from outside the US (I checked for a user page for you, and there isn't one)? If so, perhaps I can help to clarify the English. I might also suggest that mindwandering is perhaps not the best term, despite its growing usse. Perhaps "spontaneous thought" or some other such term would be better.

However, you are right to link spontanous thought with the default network as suggested by Raichle. This is also something that fits with Global Workspace models of consciousness, which perhaps could also be cited. Edhubbard 16:31, 8 August 2006 (UTC)