Summary of the literature review
Several studies have evidenced the detrimental role of mind-wandering during the completion of tasks that depend on the use of working memory. Considering that musical practice is an activity that requires the use of working memory (Brown & Palmer, 2013), it seems possible that musicians may also wander while practicing. However, besides working memory capacity or attentional capacity in isolation, there are dispositional variables such as the difficulty of the piece, stress, motivation, and dispositional variables such as mindfulness that may also influence the propensity of the musician to mind-wander. Musicians may thus wander more when feeling tired, stressed, or faced with a piece, not enough cognitively challenging or too difficult. Of course, they may also wander more when their mindfulness dispositional levels are lower.
Furthermore, distinguishing between spontaneous and deliberate types of mind-wandering may also be relevant when discerning between focused and distracted musicians. Given the importance of the different contextual variables and the intentionality of mind-wandering (spontaneous or deliberate), these will be included as the object of investigation in this study, where the interaction between mindfulness and mind-wandering in a musician is observed through a wider lens. For instance, the mindfulness intervention may not affect focus of attention directly, but through an increase in motivation or better resilience to worry. It may also be the case that fatigue would make participants more distracted and less inclined to be mindful.
Several studies have evidenced that mindfulness may lead to subjective improvements in multiple facets of vocal and instrumental practice such as efficiency, focus of attention, body awareness, creativity, structure and organization, readiness, productivity, motivation, acceptance, non-judgment, simplicity, and positivity. This study will try to accomplish some of these findings by administering 3 different mindfulness-guided meditations over 1 week. Moreover, having examined several mind-wandering studies contrasted thoroughly with the available current literature on mindfulness applied in the musical context, we can find some interesting intersecting points. Generally, it seems that the practice of mindfulness leads to states that are contrasting with mind-wandering. We find that, while mind-wandering seems to generate a lack of motivation, effort, distraction, less efficiency, stress, and judgment, mindfulness triggers the opposite states. In the next section, we will examine whether the literature has been able to find an actual relationship between mind-wandering and mindfulness.
Studies examining the relationship between mind-wandering and mindfulness emphasize the idea that the practice of mindfulness, in different time lengths, may reduce the frequency and negative impact of mind-wandering during the performance of activities that rely on working memory. Thus, one could hypothesize that such discoveries may also apply to music practice, an activity that also relies on the use of working memory and, therefore, requires de use of conscious executive thinking. However, If the relationship between MW and mindfulness is embedded within a multi-faceted approach (Robinson et al., 2020), the association between these two factors might be adulterated by other confounding factors that were not accounted for in the studies examining the relationship between mindfulness and mind-wandering. Therefore, to have a more holistic idea of how mindfulness and mind-wandering may interact, the following study took into account those variables when measuring the impact of mindfulness on the distractibility of participants.
