Reclusland

• craving a cigarette while performing a cognitive task not only increases the chances of a person’s mind wandering, but also makes that person less likely to notice when his or her mind has wandered.

• craving disrupts an individual’s meta-awareness, the ability to periodically appraise one’s own thoughts.

• Participants were assigned at random to either a crave-condition or low-crave group. Those in the latter group were permitted to smoke throughout the study; members of the crave-condition group had to abstain. Participants were asked to read as many as 34 pages of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” from a computer screen. If they caught themselves zoning out, they pressed a key labeled ZO. Every few minutes, a tone sounded, and they were asked via the computer, “Were you zoning out?” to which they responded by pressing a “Yes” or “No” key. After 30 minutes, a reading comprehension test was administered.

• Although both groups were prompted a similar number of times, the people craving cigarettes acknowledged more mind-wandering episodes-three times as many, in fact- as those in the low-crave group. But as far as independently recognizing (meta-awareness) that they were zoning out, those who were craving were no more likely to do so than the other group. Participants in the craving group had at least three times as many opportunities to catch themselves zoning out-but they did not. They were impaired in their ability to notice their own mind-wandering episodes.

• this may explain why craving often disrupts efforts to exercise self-control-a process requiring the ability to become aware of your current state in order to regulate it.”

(via here)

see also:

• my previous post: “It’s not because of the study in itself, but because certain people don’t make the effort, they forget themselves.“
• Gurdjieff: “Remember yourself always and everywhere.“