Mind Wandering During Lectures

Magda Stanová

Lectures, panel discussions, and conferences are formats for collective listening, but they took on conventions that make listening difficult: reading aloud complicated texts, speaking quickly in order to squeeze as much material as possible, showing slides with long texts, sitting for a long time without moving. Silence is considered awkward, so there is little time to think about what has been said. In this video paper, I dissect the decorum of oral presentation formats in academia and outline how the attention of the members of an audience diverges and converges with that of the speaker. I also share some observations about verbalizing non-verbal ideas, in particular about how a text description at the beginning of a project can tie its loose ends too tightly. At the end of my talk at the Klagenfurt conference, I handed out questionnaires, in which I asked the audience members to mark the sentences which they remembered from my talk. Then, while another presenter was speaking, I drew a graph of mind wandering of the audience members based on the questionnaires and showed it at the end of the session. In the second part of this video paper, I explain the process of evaluating the responses and present the resulting graph.

This exposition is published in the Proceedings of the 1^st symposium Forum Artistic Research: listen for beginnings.

Mind Wandering During Lectures

Magda Stanová

This contribution is presented as a video paper (Video 1) based on the original presentation at the symposium.

Video 1: Mind Wandering During Lectures

Note on the limitations of the graph

References

Barthes, Roland. 1975. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. Hill and Wang. Page 24.
META Lab of the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at the University of California Santa Barbara. n.d. “Verbal Overshadowing”. Accessed October 27, 2024. https://labs.psych.ucsb.edu/schooler/jonathan/research/verbal-overshadowing. (Besides overshadowing, META lab, the director of which is Jonathan Schooler, does also research about mind wandering and creativity.)
Schooler, Jonathan W., and Tonya Y. Engstler-Schooler. 1990. “Verbal Overshadowing of Visual Memories: Some Things Are Better Left Unsaid”. Cognitive Psychology 22: 36-71. doi: 10.1016/0010-0285(90)90003-M.
Stanová, Magda. 2023. “Artistic Thinking in Scientific Research”. Acta Academiae Artium Vilnensis, no. 109 (August): 84-100. doi: 10.37522/aaav.109.2023.161.
Yovino, Daniel. 2008. “How to Live Productively Using Your Hipster PDA”. Filmed November 29, 2008, at “The Art of How-To” in the Koret Education Center of SFMOMA, San Francisco. Posted May 20, 2010, by Daniel Plus Yovino. YouTube, 6:03, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HqMV7XNfS4.

Acknowledgements

The video recording from the conference was made by Daniele Pozzi. The two photos from the conference that are within the video were taken by Daniele Pozzi and Hanns Holger Rutz. Mind Wandering During Lectures is an evolving lecture show of various lengths. Each rendition is adapted to the theme of the conference where it is presented. An older version of the lecture show has been published in the open educational resource titled Listening as a Shared and Social Practice¹ (University of Regina, 2024) edited by Lindsey French and Kate Joranson.

https://www.saskoer.ca/listeningsharedsocialpractice/ (accessed 27 Oct 2025).

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Mind Wandering During Lectures

References

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