Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind (Houghton Mifflin; 2008)

* Another study, commissioned by a soap manufacturer, suggests that in the shower "men split their time daydreaming about sex (57 percent) and thinking about work (57 percent)." As Dave Barry put it on his blog, "This tells us two things: (1) Men lie to survey-takers. (2) Survey-takers do not always have a solid understanding of mathematics."

meetings one in three office workers reportedly daydreams about sex. An economist quoted in the UK's Sunday Daily Times estimates that this daydreaming may cost the British economy about £7.8 billion annually.

If you're not the boss, statistics on daydreaming about sex might be amusing, but "zoning out," as it is known in the technical literature, is a real problem. For example, all told, nearly a 100,000 Americans a year die in accidents of various sorts (in motor vehicles or otherwise); if even a third of those tragedies are due to lapses of attention, mind wandering is one of the top ten leading causes of death.*

My computer never zones out while downloading my email, but I find my mind wandering all the time, and not just during faculty meetings; to my chagrin, this also happens during those rare moments when I have time for pleasure reading. Attention-deficit disorder (ADD) gets all the headlines, but in reality, nearly everyone periodically finds it hard to stay on task.

What explains our species-wide tendency to zone out — even, sometimes, in the midst of important things? My guess is that our inherent distractibility is one more consequence of the sloppy integration between an ancestral, reflexive set of goal-setting mechanisms (perhaps shared with all mammals) and our evolutionarily more recent deliberative system, which, clever as it may be, aren't always kept in the loop.

Even when we aren't zoning out, we are often chickening out: putting off till tomorrow what we really ought to do today. As the eighteenth-century lexicographer and essayist Samuel Johnson put it (some 200 years before the invention of video games), procrastination is "one of the general weaknesses, which in spite of the instruction of moralists,

*One recent NHTSA study suggests that fully 80 percent of fender-benders can be attributed to inattention. Among fatal car accidents, no firm numbers are available, but we know that about 40 percent are attributable to alcohol; among the remaining 60 percent involving sober drivers, inattention likely plays a major role.

and the remonstrances of reason, prevail to a greater or less degree in every mind."

By one recent estimate, 80-95 percent of college students engage in procrastination, and two thirds of all students consider themselves to be (habitual) procrastinators. Another estimate says that 15-20 percent of all adults are chronically affected — and I can't help but wonder whether the rest are simply lying. Most people are troubled by procrastination; most characterize it as bad, harmful, and foolish. And most of us do it anyway.

It's hard to see how procrastination per se could be adaptive. The costs are often considerable, the benefits minuscule, and it wastes all the mental effort people put into making plans in the first place. Studies have shown that students who routinely procrastinate consistently get lower grades; businesses that miss deadlines due to the procrastination of their employees can sometimes lose millions of dollars. Yet many of us can't help ourselves. Why, when so little good comes of procrastinating, do we persist in doing it so much?

I for one hope someone figures out the answer, and soon, maybe even inventing a magic pill that can keep us on task. Too bad no one's gotten around to it just yet: tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. In the meantime, the research that has been done suggests a diagnosis if not a solution: procrastination is, in words of one psychologist, the "quintessential self-regulatory failure." Nobody, of course, can at a given moment do all of the things that need to be done, but the essence of procrastination is the way in which we defer progress on our own most important goals.