Mind wandering is a topic in experimental psychology that refers to the experience that thoughts rarely remain on a single topic for a long period of time when people are not engaged in an attention demanding task. In particular, mindwandering refers to a sub topic in the study of attention and consciousness, relating to times when attention may lapse, or wander. Mind wandering experiences are defined by their lack of relation to the task in hand and are more likely to occur during driving, reading and other activities where vigilance may be low.

In these situations, people report having no memory of what happened in the surrounding environment while preoccupied with their thoughts. Although mind wandering was first discussed by John Antrobus and Jerome Singer in the late 1960s it has more recently become a growing research topic in cognitive psychology, cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience.

Mind wandering and other private experiences can be studied using thought sampling, or simply asking participants what they are thinking about at any given moment. Another way in which mind wandering has been studied is through the use of the sustained attention to response task, originally developed by Ian Robertson and his colleagues at Trinity College, Dublin to explore deficits in executive control after lesions to the frontal lobe.

From a scientific perspective, two aspects of mind wandering are of interest. The first is understanding how the brain produces what William James referred to as the stream of consciousness. This aspect of mindwandering research is focused on understanding how the brain generates the spontaneous and relatively unconstrained thoughts that are experienced when the mind wanders. One candidate neural mechanism for generating this aspect of experience is a network of regions in the frontal and parietal cortex, which Washington University neuroscientist Marcus Raichle has dubbed the default network. This network of regions is highly active even when subjects are resting with their eyes closed, suggesting a role in generating spontaneous internal thoughts.

The second aspect of mind wandering of scientific interest is what it means for the mind to process information that is unrelated to the outside environment. One way to describe this state of attention is to say that when the mind wanders, awareness is decoupled from the task environment. Studies have suggested that memory for concurrently presented information is impaired when the mind wanders.

In addition to neural models, computational models of consciousness based on Bernard Baars’ Global Workspace theory suggest that mind wandering, or spontaneous thought may involve competition between internally and externally generated activities attempting to gain access to a limited capacity central network.

Cognitive dissonance is an uncomfortable feeling caused by holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously. The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance by changing their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, or by justifying or rationalizing their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. Cognitive dissonance theory is one of the most influential and extensively studied theories in social psychology.

Dissonance normally occurs when a person perceives a logical inconsistency among his or her cognitions. This happens when one idea implies the opposite of another. For example, a belief in animal rights could be interpreted as inconsistent with eating meat or wearing fur. Noticing the contradiction would lead to dissonance, which could be experienced as anxiety, guilt, shame, anger, embarrassment, stress, and other negative emotional states.

A powerful cause of dissonance is when an idea conflicts with a fundamental element of the self, such as “I made the right decision.” The anxiety that comes with the possibility of having made a bad decision can lead to rationalization and a tendency to create additional reasons or justifications to support one’s choices.

A person who just spent too much money on a new car might decide that the new vehicle is much less likely to break down than his or her old car. This belief may or may not be true, but it would likely reduce dissonance and make the person feel better.

In Festinger and Carlsmith’s classic 1959 experiment, students were asked to perform the boring and tedious task of turning pegs a quarter turn over and over again. The task was designed to generate a strong, negative attitude. After an hour of working on the tasks, participants were asked to persuade another subject that the dull, boring task the subject had just completed was actually interesting and engaging. Some participants were paid $20 for the favor, another group was paid $1, and a control group was not asked to perform the favor.

When asked to rate the boring task at the conclusion of the study, those in the $1 group rated it more positively than those in the $20 and control groups. This was explained by Festinger and Carlsmith as evidence for cognitive dissonance. The researchers theorized that people experienced dissonance between the conflicting cognitions, “I told someone that the task was interesting”, and “I actually found it boring.” When paid only $1, students were forced to internalize the attitude they were induced to express, because they had no other justification. Those in the $20 condition, however, had an obvious external justification for their behavior, and thus experienced less dissonance.

In 1969, Elliot Aronson reformulated the basic theory by linking it to the self concept. According to this new interpretation, cognitive dissonance does not arise because people experience dissonance between conflicting cognitions. Instead, it occurs when people see their actions as conflicting with their normally positive view of themselves. Thus, in the original Festinger and Carlsmith study, Aronson stated that the dissonance was between the cognition, “I am an honest person” and the cognition, “I lied to someone about finding the task interesting.” Other psychologists have argued that maintaining cognitive consistency is a way to protect public self image, rather than private self concept.

Karen Horney (pronounced “horn-eye”) was a German psychodynamic psychologist of Norwegian and Dutch descent. Her theories questioned traditional Freudian views as well as the instinct orientation of psychoanalysis and its genetic psychology.

From roughly the age of nine Horney changed her perspective on life, becoming ambitious and somewhat rebellious. She felt that she could not become pretty and instead decided to vest her energies into her intellectual qualities. At this time she developed a crush on her older brother, who became embarrassed by her attentions. It was here Horney suffered her first of several bouts of depression that would plague her for the rest of her life.

Horney looked at neurosis in a different light from other psychoanalysts of the time. Horney believed neurosis to be a continuous process, with neuroses commonly occurring sporadically in one’s lifetime. This was in contrast to the opinions of her contemporaries who believed neurosis was a negative malfunction of the mind in response to external stimuli, such as bereavement, divorce or negative experiences during childhood and adolescence.

From her experiences as a psychiatrist, Horney named ten patterns of neurotic needs. These ten needs are based upon things which she thought all humans require to succeed in life. A neurotic person could theoretically exhibit all of these needs, though in practice much fewer than ten need be present to constitute a person having a neurosis. The ten needs, as set out by Horney, are as follows:

Moving Toward People

1. The need for affection and approval. Pleasing others and being liked by them.

2. The need for a partner. One whom they can love and who will solve all problems.

Moving Against People

3. The need for power. The ability to bend wills and achieve control over others. While most persons seek strength, the neurotic may be desperate for it.

4. The need to exploit others, to get the better of them. To become manipulative, fostering the belief that people are there simply to be used.

5. The need for social recognition, prestige and limelight.

6. The need for personal admiration, for both inner and outer qualities. To be valued.

7. The need for personal achievement. Though virtually all persons wish to make achievements, the neurotic may be desperate for achievement.

Moving Away from People

8. The need for self sufficiency and independence. While most desire some autonomy, the neurotic may simply wish to discard other individuals entirely.

9. The need for perfection. While many are driven to perfect their lives in the form of well being, the neurotic may display a fear of being slightly flawed.

10. Lastly, the need to restrict life practices to within narrow borders. To live as inconspicuous a life as possible.

As implied, while non-neurotic individuals may strive for these needs, neurotics exhibit a much deeper, more willful and concentrated desire to fulfill the said needs. Horney, together with fellow psychoanalyst Alfred Adler, formed the Neo-Freudian discipline.

Through her views on the individual psyche, Horney postulated that the self is in fact the core of one’s own being and potential. Horney believed that if one has an accurate conception of oneself, then one is free to realize one’s potential and achieve what one wishes. Thus, she believed that self-actualization is the healthy person’s aim through life, as opposed to the neurotic’s clinging to a set of key needs.

According to Sigmund Freud, projection is a psychological defense mechanism whereby one inflicts one’s own undesirable thoughts, motivations, desires, and feelings onto someone else. It is a common process that every person uses to some degree.

To understand the process, consider a person in a couple who has thoughts of infidelity. Instead of dealing with these undesirable thoughts consciously, he or she subconsciously projects these feelings onto the other person, and begins to think that the other has thoughts of infidelity and may be having an affair. In this sense, projection is related to denial, arguably the only defense mechanism that is more primitive than projection. Projection, like all defense mechanisms provide a function whereby truth about a part of themselves that may otherwise be unacceptable is shielded.

Compartmentalization, splitting and projection are ways that the ego continues to pretend that it is completely in control at all times, when in reality human experience is one of shifting beingness, instinctual or territorial reactiveness and emotional motives, for which the “I” is not always complicit. Further, common in deep trauma, individuals will be unable to access truthful memories, intentions and experiences, even about their own nature, wherein projection is just one tool.

It has been described as the operation of expelling feelings or wishes the individual finds wholly unacceptable, too shameful, too obscene, too dangerous by attributing them to another.

The philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach based his theory of religion in large part upon the idea of projection such that the idea that an anthropomorphic deity is the outward projection of man’s anxieties and desires.

Psychological projection is the subject of Robert Bly’s book A Little Book on the Human Shadow. The shadow, a term used in Jungian psychology to describe a variety of psychological projection, refers to the projected material. Marie-Louise Von Franz extended the view of projection to cover phenomena in Patterns of Creativity Mirrored in Creation Myths and notes that wherever known reality stops, where we touch the unknown, there we project an archetypal image.

When addressing psychological trauma the defense mechanism is sometimes counter projection, including an obsession to continue and remain in a recurring trauma causing situation, and the compulsive obsession with the perceived perpetrator of the trauma or its projection.

Carl Jung mentioned that all projections provoke counter projection when the object is unconscious of the quality projected upon it by the subject.

Projection is the opposite defense mechanism to identification. We project our own unpleasant feelings onto someone else and blame them for having thoughts that we really have.

Culture industry is a term coined by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who argued that popular culture is akin to a factory producing standardized cultural goods to manipulate the masses into passivity; the easy pleasures available through consumption of popular culture make people docile and content, no matter how difficult their economic circumstances. Adorno and Horkheimer saw this mass-produced culture as a danger to the more difficult high arts. Culture industries may cultivate false needs; that is, needs created and satisfied by capitalism. True needs, in contrast, are freedom, creativity, or genuine happiness.

Adorno and Horkheimer were key members of the Frankfurt School. They were much influenced by the dialectical materialism and historical materialism of Karl Marx, as well the revisitation of the dialectical idealism of Hegel, in both of which where events are studied not in isolation but as part of the process of change. As a group later joined by Jurgen Habermas, they were responsible for the formulation of Critical Theory.

In works such as Dialectic of Enlightenment and Negative Dialectics, Adorno and Horkheimer theorised that the phenomenon of mass culture has a political implication, namely that all the many forms of popular culture are a single culture industry whose purpose is to ensure the continued obedience of the masses to market interests. In The Dialectic of Enlightenment, they postulated a modern form of bread and circuses, the method used by the rulers of Ancient Rome to maintain their power and control over the people. This new system filled leisure time with amusements to distract the consumers from the boredom of their increasingly automated work. They were never left alone long enough to recognise the reality of their exploitation and to consider resisting the economic and social system. This pessimistic view of prevailing culture as an anti-enlightenment opiate for the masses draws strongly on Marxism for its condemnation of what is characterised as being continuing capitalist oppression.

Although Western culture used to be divided into national markets and then into highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow, the modern view of mass culture is that there is a single marketplace in which the best or most popular works succeed. This recognizes that the consolidation of media companies has centralized power in the hands of the few remaining multinational corporations now controlling production and distribution. The theory proposes that culture not only mirrors society, but also takes an important role in shaping society through the processes of standardization and commodification, creating objects rather than subjects. The culture industry claims to serve the consumers’ needs for entertainment, but conceals the way that it standardizes these needs, manipulating the consumers to desire what it produces.

The outcome is that mass production feeds a mass market that minimizes the identity and tastes of the individual consumers who are as interchangeable as the products they consume. The rationale of the theory is to promote the emancipation of the consumer from the tyranny of the producers by inducing the consumer to question beliefs and ideologies. Adorno claimed that enlightenment would bring pluralism and demystification. Unfortunately, society is said to have suffered another fall, corrupted by capitalist industry with exploitative motives.

Anything made by a person is a materialisation of their labour and an expression of their intentions. There will also be a use value: the benefit to the consumer will be derived from its utility. The exchange value will reflect its utility and the conditions of the market: the prices paid by the television broadcaster or at the box office. Yet, the modern soap operas with their interchangeable plots and formulaic narrative conventions reflect standardised production techniques and the falling value of a mass produced cultural product. Only rarely is a film released that makes a more positive impression on the general discourse and achieves a higher exchange value. 

Critics of the theory say that the products of mass culture would not be popular if people did not enjoy them, and that culture is self-determining in its administration. This would deny Adorno contemporary political significance, arguing that politics in a prosperous society is more concerned with action than with thought. Adorno is also accused of a lack of consistency in his claims to be implementing Marxism. Whereas he accepted the classical Marxist analysis of society showing how one class exercises domination over another, he deviated from Marx in his failure to use dialectic as a method to propose ways to change.

Marx’s theory depended on the willingness of the working class to overthrow the ruling class, but Adorno and Horkheimer postulated that the culture industry has undermined the revolutionary movement. Adorno’s idea that the mass of the people are only objects of the culture industry is linked to his feeling that the time when the working class could be the tool of overthrowing capitalism is over. 

However, despite these problems, the concept has influenced intellectual discourse on popular culture, popular culture studies, and Cultural Institutions Studies.

Pocket gophers are burrowing rodents of the family Geomyidae. These are the “true” gophers, though several ground squirrels of the family Sciuridae are often called gophers as well. The name pocket gopheron its own may be used to refer to any of a number of subspecies of the family. Pocket gophers are a symbol of the state of Minnesota, sometimes called the Gopher State.

Gophers are heavily built, and most are moderately large, ranging from 4.7 to 12 inches in length, and weighing a few hundred grams. A few species reach weights approaching 2.2 lb. Males are always larger than the females and can be nearly double their weight. Most gophers have brown fur which often closely matches the color of the soil in which they live. Their most characteristic feature is their large cheek pouches, from which the word pocket in their name derives. These pouches are fur-lined, and can be turned inside out. They extend from the side of the mouth well back onto the shoulders. They have small eyes and a short, hairy tail which they use to feel around tunnels when they walk backwards.

Pocket gophers are solitary outside of the breeding season, aggressively maintaining territories that vary in size depending on the resources available. Males and females may share some burrows and nesting chambers if their territories border each other, but in general, each pocket gopher inhabits its own individual tunnel system.

Depending on the species and local conditions, pocket gophers may have a specific annual breeding season, or may breed repeatedly through the year. Each litter typically consists of two to five young, although this may be much higher in some species. The young are born blind and helpless, and are weaned at around forty days.

All pocket gophers are burrowers. They are hoarders and their cheek pouches are used for transporting food back to their burrows. Gophers can collect large hoards. Their presence is unambiguously announced by the appearance of mounds of fresh dirt about 8 inches in diameter. These mounds will often appear in vegetable gardens, lawns, or farms, as gophers like moist soil. They also enjoy feeding on vegetables. They may also damage trees in forests. 

For this reason, some species are considered agricultural pests. There have been many ways devised to exterminate them, and several commercial enterprises have capitalized on methods using ultrasonic units embedded in the ground, poison baits and traps. These methods, however, are largely ineffective since new pocket gophers will return to existing tunnels and easily reinhabit an area.

Carbon monoxide from vehicle exhaust is an effective and inexpensive method that some people use to exterminate gophers. However, poisoning animals with carbon monoxide is illegal in some states, including California. Garden hoses are coupled to the exhaust pipes of vehicles using medium size soda bottles and duct tape, and with one end of the hose connected to the exhaust and the other end in the gopher tunnel, a vehicle is idled until toxic carbon monoxide fills the tunnel network, killing the gophers. This usually takes about 30 minutes.

A concussion method kills gophers instantly with a shock wave. Specialized equipment used by trained operators wearing personal protective equipment injects a mixture of propane and oxygen into the gopher burrow. An igniter on the end of the injection probe explodes the fuel mixture, destroying not only the gophers, but the burrows as well. It sends a fireball and intense shock wave throughout the tunnel network. This method is obviously not suited for urban residential areas. The destruction of the burrows by this method prevents loss of irrigation water, prevents injury from collapse of the burrow underfoot, and may make any reinfestation more quickly noticeable. Killing animals with explosives is illegal in some jurisdictions, although the concussion method is not regulated by US federal law. In Colorado the concussion method was approved for the control of prairie dogs in November of 2007.

Although pocket gophers will attempt to flee when threatened, they may attack other animals, including cats and humans, and can inflict serious bites with their long, sharp teeth.