Les Bonnes Choses

Okay, it's not that often that a blog-complete thought just drops on my lap like this. Usually they percolate for a few days, during which time they get pushed aside and sometimes forgotten altogether, leading to week-long lapses. Thank goodness for psychological researchers, on whom you can usually count to do something bizarre. In this case, it was a study on mind wandering about which I read just now on The Ceeb.

In their study, the researchers used an iPhone app, one of the few I apparently haven't downloaded, to track people's mind wandering at random intervals. That's fine and well. Kudos to them for being tech savvy (though not so hardcore as to hack the Half-Life game engine).

Does that count as a citation?

Anyways, here's the Bonnes Choses-ready passage that caught my eye:

The real-time data showed that on average, people reported that their minds were wandering 46.9 per cent of time, and no less than 30 per cent of the time during every activity except making love.

Ahem. Excuse me? The only way I can see that statistic being collected would be for participants in their study to have engaged in coitus interruptus to answer their damn iPhones. I mean, people actually did! And while the Catholic Church might approve of this method of birth control, I can't imagine participants were adequately remunerated, even if the authors gave away the damn iPhones to go with their app. Plus, now the participants are stuck with AT&T contracts. I think the Harvard IRB is going to hear about this.