[phaedrus]

Does mind wandering in this context refer to daydreaming or does it refer to blanking out? As someone with late-diagnosed ADHD and likely also on the spectrum, I find myself struggling with both of these. I engage in a lot of Walter Mitty-esque hyper realistic daydreams, but I also have random periods of minutes of completely blank mind. Both result in a lot of "lost time" for me throughout the day. It runs in my family such we refer to it as "the our-surname fog".

Skimming this paper it's unclear to me whether the author is referring to one or the other, or both.

Interestingly I'm not sure that the mind wandering is separable from my creativity and problem solving. Often I'll come out of a blank period with the answer to something without consciously having been thinking about it. I think of these periods of "lost time" in my day as background processing - it's just my misfortune I live in a world where it's not socially or economically acceptable to space out for long periods throughout the day.

[even_639765]

I don't know about the blanking out part, but the rest of the description sounds like a regular human being. That intense daydreaming is, while not everyone's state, pretty typical of people generally. People with powerful brains just experience things intensely or deeply, including their own reverie. You should harness some of that horsepower.

But you always knew that, because it's obvious