In an experience-sampling study that bridged laboratory, ecological, and individual-differences approaches to mind-wandering research, 72 subjects completed an executive-control task with periodic thought probes (reported by McVay & Kane, 2009) and then carried PDAs for a week that signaled them eight times daily to report immediately whether their thoughts were off task. Subjects who reported ...

is a common problem in long-term care. However, in the design of interventions, the emphasis is on safety, and little consideration has been given to the meaning of the behavior for the person who wanders. This paper uses the Need-driven Dementiacompromised Behavior (NDB) model to demonstrate that the expression of wandering is unique to a given person in a particular context or situation. Elem...

Wandering spleen is a rare condition, characterized by a mobile spleen that is attached only by an elongated vascular pedicle, allowing it to migrate to any part of the abdomen or pelvis. Mesenteroaxial gastric volvulus usually occurs in children and may be associated with wandering spleen. Both entities result from abnormal laxity or absence of the peritoneal attachments due to abnormal fusion...

Given the negative effects of mind wandering on performance, it may be profitable to be aware of task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs) as they occur. The present study investigated whether motivating people to catch TUTs increases meta-awareness. We offered incentives for increased self-catching during reading. To enhance the veracity of these self-reports, we used a "bogus-pipeline" procedure; we con...

Alcohol consumption alters consciousness in ways that make drinking both alluring and hazardous. Recent advances in the study of consciousness using a mind-wandering paradigm permit a rigorous examination of the effects of alcohol on experiential consciousness and metaconsciousness. Fifty-four male social drinkers consumed alcohol (0.82 g/kg) or a placebo beverage and then performed a mind-wand...

This paper reports a wandering weekday effect: the pattern of day seasonality in stock market returns is not fixed, as assumed in the Monday or weekend effects, but changes over time. Analysing daily closing prices in eleven major stock markets during 1993–2007, our results show that the wandering weekday is not conditional on average returns in the previous week (the ‘‘twist” in the Monday eff...

Let K be a number field, let φ(x) ∈ K(x) be a rational function of degree d > 1, and let α ∈ K be a wandering point such that φ(α) = 0 for all n > 0. We prove that if the abc-conjecture holds for K, then for all but finitely many positive integers n, there is a prime p of K such that vp(φ (α)) > 0 and vp(φ (α)) 0 for all positive integers m < n. Under appropriate ramification hypotheses, we can...

The acute torsion of wandering spleen is a very rare disease characterized by acute abdominal pain. Without early surgical intervention, wandering spleen can lead to splenic infarction or rupture. However, early clinical diagnosis is very difficult, so imaging modalities play an important role. We present a case of acute abdominal pain due to torsion of the wandering spleen in a 17-year-old gir...

Studies have suggested that the default mode network is active during mind wandering, which is often experienced intermittently during sustained attention tasks. Conversely, an anticorrelated task-positive network is thought to subserve various forms of attentional processing. Understanding how these two systems work together is central for understanding many forms of optimal and sub-optimal ta...

Wandering spleen is a rare cause of acute abdomen. Generally, it remains asymptomatic, it may present clinically as a painless mobile mass or rarely as an acute abdomen when the wandering spleen twists on its pedicle, resulting in splenic congestion, infarction with or without involvement of neighbouring visceras. Here, we present an unusual case of torsion of a wandering spleen, which resulted...