Mind surfing : attention in musical absorption

Literature in the psychology of music and in cognitive psychology claims – paradoxically – that musical absorption includes processes of both focused attention and mind wandering. We examine this paradox and aim to resolve it by integrating accounts from cognitive psychology on attention and mind wandering with qualitative phenomenological research on some of the world’s most skilled musicians. We claim that a mode of experience that involves intense attention and what superficially seems like mind wandering is possible. We propose to grasp this different mode of experience with a new concept: “mind surfing”. We suggest that a conjoined consideration of attention’s intensive and selective capacities can partially explain how one can be both focused and freely “surfing” on a “musical wave” at the same time. Finally, we couple this novel and foundational work on attention with a 4E cognition account to show how music acts as an affective and cognitive scaffold, thereby enabling the surfing.


Introduction
Musical absorption is a seemingly paradoxical phenomenon.Artists who have undergone such intense states of absorption describe it both as a form of hyper-awareness but also as a blackout-like experience (e.g., Buttingsrud, 2018;Montero, 2019), as "being there" and "not being there at all" (Høffding, 2019).Similarly, music listeners may feel lost in imagery and reminiscences, but they may at the same time feel fully aware of the present and deeply absorbed in the musical flow (Herbert, 2011).A similar claim has been made by literary scholars about readers that are immersed into narratives (Kukkonen, 2019).
In the domain of expert musicianship, absorption refers to a number of different classes of experiences that one might undergo while practicing or performing.These range from ordinary, even boring, experiences (e.g., "another day at the job"), to clear instances of mind wandering, but also to intense experiences that momentarily change fundamental structures of consciousness such as the perception of time, space, and self.Several recent accounts of absorption in musicking (i.e., any activity encompassing musical engagement, like composing, performing, or listening; Small, 1998), from the perspectives of cognitive psychology (e.g., Lange et al., 2017) and ethnographicallyinformed music psychology (Herbert, 2011(Herbert, , 2019)), stipulate that musical absorption during listening simultaneously involves rich perceptual content and heightened attention with intense focus on the task at hand, as well as their opposites, like mind wandering, "zoning out", and dissociation away from the task at hand (e.g., Vroegh, 2019).
Hence, musical absorption presents a persistent scholarly challenge.We need to consider more complex interactions between the cognitive processes underlying both absorption and mind wandering to make sense of musical absorption and understand whether "total" attention (Tellegen & Atkinson, 1974) and something which resembles mind wandering can co-exist in absorption, or whether they are mutually exclusive.The concept of musical absorption seems haunted by imprecision in current scholarship, as it is associated with immersion, hypnotisability, trance, mind wandering, object-processing, mental effort, total attention, absent self-awareness, flow, or altered states of consciousness, many of which are equally underdetermined concepts.Given this plethora of associations, does it even make sense to think of musical absorption as one coherent phenomenon at all?We will argue that a tenable way forward is to split musical absorption into different kinds, with different degrees of attention and mind wandering.Our position is that musical absorption indeed is multifaceted, but also that this multifaceted quality is an invitation to re-think its underlying mental processes as well as the modes of experiences that these processes might dynamically frame.
To approach the debate, we take inspiration from qualitative and phenomenological work conducted with the renowned Danish String Quartet (DSQ), which has produced a mental topography distinguishing several kinds of absorption (Høffding, 2019).Among the states of most intense absorption reported by these expert musicians, we find one variant called "ex-static absorption" (Høffding, 2019, chap. 4).It is this ex-static kind of absorption that we name here "mind surfing" and that the present paper seeks to explicate as its explanandum, since it is a paradigmatic example of musical absorption as a paradoxical phenomenon.In our view, mind surfing is a mode of experience, not an underlying mental or cognitive process.In the domain of phenomenology, a mode of experience refers to a certain experiential modality, whereas in the domain of cognitive psychology, a mental process, is a basic, neurally-correlated, psychological process.Couched in an intensive bodily awareness, the mode of mind surfing appears to rely on a specific coupling between intensive and selective aspects of the mental process of attention.Mind surfing can be regarded a general mode of experience existing at least across aesthetic domains and perhaps more widely in everyday experiences, but only under certain enabling conditions, which we shall specify in turn.
Resolving the paradox just described-of the presence of both focused attention and mind wandering in musical absorption-is no simple task and will require several steps.In Part 2 of the paper, we describe the paradox as found in recent literature.In Part 3, to illustrate the kind of experiences that are most likely targeted in the paradoxical accounts, we give examples from the qualitative and phenomenological work with the DSQ and make more formal definitions of mind surfing.Part 4 is devoted to describing the cognitive enabling conditions of the mind surfing mode of experience, reviewing foundational literature on attention and mind wandering.Before concluding, Part 5 draws on work in 4E cognition on musical scaffolding to further define necessary and sufficient conditions of mind surfing (in the context of 4E cognition, the term "surfing" has already been suggested by Andy Clark (2016).Clark's work, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind, concerns the predictive coding paradigm and should not be conflated with mind surfing, which is a much narrower concept).
2) Setting up the paradox: recent research on musical absorption

2.1) Absorption in psychology
In a seminal article, Tellegen and Atkinson (1974) construed absorption as "a full commitment of available perceptual, motoric, imaginative and ideational resources to a unified representation of the attentional object" (1974, p. 274).In other words, a cognitive style of "total attention" that fully engages one's mental (i.e., perceptual, enactive, imaginative, and ideational) resources and amplifies one aspect of reality over others (Dal Cin, Hall & Lane 2016).They developed the influential "Tellegen Absorption Scale" that has inspired models of deep mental involvement, such as presence, immersion, flow, or cognitive absorption (see also Agarwal & Karahanna 2000).Their perspective was originally inspired by Maslow's (1968) idea of "peak experiences", characterized by "fascination" and "totality of interest", notably involving an "openness to the object in all of its aspects with all one's senses, including one's kinaesthetic experience".
In current cognitive psychology, attentional intensity, focus, or concentration are believed to depend on adjustments of the level of cognitive arousal (Kahneman 1973), which in turn depend on the neuromodulatory activity of the ascending arousal system of the brain (Aston-Jones & Cohen 2005;Laeng & Alnaes, 2019).Thus, several studies have employed eye tracking and/or pupillometry to obtain a psychophysiological index of absorption (e.g., Franklin, Broadway, Mrazek, Smallwood & Schooler, 2013;Unsworth & Robinson, 2018).For example, Lange, Zweck & Sinn (2017) monitored the rate of micro-saccades (i.e., small fixations of gaze that overlap over a same region of the visual field) as another proxy for the degree of musical absorption (fewer saccades indicating more intense absorption, further defined as "cognitive load"; Ibid.p. 62).They claim that state and trait absorptions are related to "hypnotic states", "altered states of consciousness", "dissociation and trancing" and "absent self-awareness" and that a biological marker has been identified for "absorption as a personality trait".Accordingly, Lange and colleagues (2017, p. 60) state that musical absorption fully engages the attentional apparatus to process the musical attentional "object", defining state absorption as object processing; although the authors also make the contradicting claim that «state absorption is not identical with object processing".Lange and colleagues (2017) also make a seemingly conflictual claim that "absorption is highly related to…mind-wandering".Vroegh (2019, p. 157), also using Tellegen's absorption scale, presents a similar conflictual claim that absorption includes "intense focal concentration" together with "fantasy proneness, imagery ability and synaesthesia".While Lange and colleagues (2017) do not mention the seemingly mutually exclusive definitions of absorption, Vroegh (2019) proposes a multiplicity of absorption states as a function of two partly compatible mental sets, without however explaining how these states come about.Our current paper, then, picks up from the point where Vroegh ends.

2.2) Absorption in everyday listening
As documented by Herbert (2011Herbert ( , 2019)), many of us can undergo intense states of absorption when listening to recorded music.She defines absorption as: "an effortless, non-volitional quality of deep involvement with the objects of consciousness", as opposed to attentional engagement that is "goaldirected, rational and effortful".Yet, it is questionable that «effortlessness» is a necessary feature of absorption (Montero, 2016(Montero, , 2017)).Interestingly, Herbert (2019) breaks up absorption into different kinds with its respective associated mental processes, namely: 1) "a narrowing of awareness"; 2) "a broadening or fluctuation of awareness"; and 3) "an involvement with the music in which it slowly receded from conscious awareness".This seems to solve the conceptual tension with a move from singular absorption to plural absorptions.Yet, this move introduces the question of why and how listening to music engages such radically different aspects of attention and awareness, as well as what their internal relations might be.
We do not dispute that musicking can alternately engage processes of mind wandering and attention, the fluctuations or "perches and flights" of thought described in William James' Principles of Psychology (1890).We believe, however, that it is possible to create a unified account that explanatorily can encompass both processes while remaining critical of the experiments and investigations based on the Tellegen Absorption Scale.While the conceptual foundations of such experiments and investigations remain imprecise and underdeveloped, our account rests on a combination of phenomenology based on "phenomenological interviews" (Høffding & Martiny, 2016;Ravn, 2023) and fundamental knowledge within cognitive neuroscience.

2.3) Reading and mind wandering
In their pioneering work on mind wandering, the psychologists Smallwood and Schooler often used a reading comprehension task to probe the quantity and quality of mind wandering during reading tasks in the laboratory (e.g., Smallwood, McSpadden and Schooler, 2008).Based on self-reporting and on the participants' ability to report correctly on the content of the reading, we can gauge the extent to which the readers were paying attention to reading.Consequently, reading comprehension is defined as the ability to report correctly on features of the text.Decreased retention can be attributed to inattentiveness in the form of mind wandering during reading (Smallwood & Schooler, 2006).Hence, in this line of research, mind wandering is essentially seen as detrimental to the primary task.
From a quite different context, literary scholar Karin Kukkonen (2019) argues that mind wandering belongs to -and is essential to -the primary task, because what we do when reading literature is not merely to focus on the meaning of what we are currently reading, but also to imagine landscapes and personalities, remember scenes and speculate about the future turn of events (see also Trasmundi & Toro 2023).These so-called "mind wanderings" -which we would argue are compatible with our conception of mind surfing, as we shall see -are integrated in the primary task of reading without breaking its "flow" (Fabry & Kukkonen 2019).
In a phenomenological interview by Høffding (2019), the violist Asbjørn Nørgaard of the Danish String Quartet, compared musical absorption to the experience of reading literature, substantiating Kukkonen's point.When asked to describe what "being in the zone" -the term he uses for intense experiences of musical absorption -means to him, he replies: "Recently, I have been reading I.P. Jacobsen and some of it is rather heavy and sometimes I simply cannot read it if I am not in the zone, or it demands that I am kind of present, but if I get into it and really immerse myself where it is just flowing, where the text flows, then it becomes a literary landscape in which I am moving, then I can flow along, but I can also enjoy and while I am immersed in it I can go back and read sentences again and I am just in a zone where I am flipping back and forth and in some way enjoying that I am enjoying it or I am aware that I am flowing along and it is more like that I feel when in the zone…" (Høffding, 2019, p. 63).
Nørgaard claims to be focused on the music, but once "in" there, his mind is also freely floating.There are certainly important differences between playing music and reading literature: music is a time-bound event and once a concert begins, "the show must go on", while, when reading, one can take breaks whenever and "pace" one's reading (Trasmundi, Toro & Mangen, 2022).Nevertheless, we might say that such breaks constitute an essential part of the reading experience and are beneficial, not detrimental (contra Smallwood, McSpadden & Schooler, 2008).Certainly, although Nørgaard paces his reading by flipping back and forth between sentences, the experience of being "in the zone" when reading is for him compatible with his experience of the zone when musicking.
3) The phenomenology of ex-static musical absorption Phenomenological interviews have uncovered different kinds of musical absorption that can occur in music performance.Musicians can be sometimes bored while playing, especially if they perceive that the audience is not engaging, and this might in turn lead to mind wandering (Høffding, 2019), such as thinking about a current shopping list -what members of the Danish String Quartet calls "going to Netto" (a Danish chain store).In the following, we shall treat only what has been categorized "exstatic" absorption because we believe that it is this kind of absorption that has been neglected in the literature despite it being vital for probing deeper the multifaced nature of absorption and its underlying mental processes.

3.1) Examples from expert musicians
From short-term ethnographic field-work, and multiple, thorough phenomenological interviews (Høffding & Martiny, 2016), we get a nuanced picture of "ex-static absorption" to denote a rare and rarefied experience of intense musical absorption which is pleasurable, existentially significant, and comes with a sense of being at a distance from oneself and the music.Remarkably, this experience happens simultaneously to being fully engaged in playing during a performance.Clearly, this is a qualitatively different experience from mind wandering, which is typically associated with boredom and the escape from the current experience, as exemplified in "going to Netto" (Høffding, 2019).Interestingly, ex-static absorption also comes with metaphors of moving or flying through space with a clear vision of the ensemble and the music unfolding: "You are both less conscious and a lot more conscious, I think.Because I still think that if you're in the zone, then I know how I'm sitting on the chair, I know if my knees are locked, I know if I am flexing my thigh muscle, I know if my shoulders are lifted, I know if my eyes are strained, I know who is sitting on the first row, I know more or less what they are doing, but it is somewhat more, like disinterested, neutrally registering, I am not like inside, I am not kind of a part of the set-up, I am just looking at it, while I'm in the zone.But if I'm not in the zone, I become a co-player, I become a part of the whole thing.And cannot look at it like a bird over the waters.I become conscious of things because I am not part of them to the same extent…It is not a primitive control.It is a kind of very deep control.Ur-control.You really feel like a commander deploying the troops and control it in a way and it gives a kick that you are just a kind of pure superiority and pure control" (Høffding 2019, pp. 60-61).
The above phenomenological report from Asbjørn Nørgaard also points to a heightened interoceptive (attention to posture and limb sensation) and perceptual (attention to the audience) focus (for a discussion about the reliability of such reports; see Høffding, Martiny & Roepstorff, 2021).At the same time, it is accompanied by a sense that he is somehow outside and above what he is sensing and seeing.Further, there is an unusual sense of control through which Nørgaard does not feel that he must steer his attention.With this sense of control, it is as if things are unfolding by themselves only guided by his mental oversight.Notably, Nørgaard's description comes with an unusual phenomenological quality, expressed in the sentence "both less conscious and a lot more conscious".In other words, Nørgaard seemingly enjoys a strongly focused attention to himself and his surrounding (e.g., the concert hall), but at the same time his mind appears to be free to move as it pleases and is not tightly locked to being attentive to the music itself.
Violinist Frederik Øland of the DSQ offers a similar description: "So it is exactly both being present and not being present simultaneously, such that you…it is hard to explain…it is kind of the feeling that…you don't take heed of each possibility…it is like…the feeling of looking over a large landscape and knowing that this landscape consists of insects and branches and roots and all kinds of things building up the whole thing, but you cannot see the individual parts, you just know that all of it is contributes to the being and that you actually could affect the little things, but you don't want to because you want everything to be there and contribute."(Høffding, 2019, pp. 50-1).
Here, we gain a clear overview of the entire performative situation and the musician's sense that every little detail of the musical situation is potentially available for inspection or entry.The mind is freely soaring at a distance from the technical and musical details, and attention can move around and simply perceive the spectacle unfolding.None of the above examples instantiate arbitrary mind wanderings, nor are they examples of merely paying close attention to the music.They are all examples of an intense form of attention, perhaps a form of hyper-awareness that is experienced as creatively enriching and existentially important for what is means to be a musician.It is difficult to pin down the exact attentional object, since attention is rapidly moving into visualizations, a widened perceptual or interoceptive awareness, or an affective sense that things are just where they are supposed to be.Attention is not necessarily or singularly focused on the music but is attuned to or entrained by it.In other words, these are examples of a different mode of experience, namely mind surfing.

3.2) Defining mind surfing
Consider the non-musical instance of bike riding.One switches between, for instance, being attentive to the lights and traffic, and mind wandering about random memories or fantasies.In keeping with the many theories that conceive expertise as relying on procedural memory (e.g., Beilock & Carr, 2001; see also Høffding & Montero, 2019, Christensen, Sutton & McIlwain, 2016), one can usually navigate the traffic situation without conscious attention or in a seemingly automatic manner, rendering the mind free to wander.Importantly, such wandering is not systematically coupled to one's perceptions, but follows its own train of thought.
In contrast, in ex-static musical absorption, one's attention is strongly focused and entrained by the music.At the same time -as the DSQ musicians recount -one might occasionally experience something which resembles mind wandering, where the mind seems to freely to "hover above" the unfolding situation.However, such "wandering" can also dynamically connect to important memories or strong emotions, informed by a feedback loop structure, such that heightened affective responses can lead back to an even more intense attentional focus onto the music.We call mind surfing this mode of looping and coupling because the mental and bodily processes involved are aligned to the music in the way a surfer relates to a swelling wave.Such mind surfing is complex and fragile and probably needs training.It can easily stray to the decoupled, classic, mind wandering (as when "going to Netto") or it can veer toward a singular narrow attentional focus, such as when limbs ache or something is out of tune.For the purposes of this article, we link closely ex-static absorption with mind surfing.As mentioned, there are other forms of absorption that do not involve mind surfing, but it seems to us that, in the musicking domain, all instances of mind surfing are probably also instances of ex-static absorption.In our conclusion, we will suggest that other activities, such as reading, aesthetic encounters, etc., could also involve mind surfing.We don't have evidence to suggest that in such activities, all instances of mind surfing would also be instances of ex-static absorption.
It is noteworthy that the semantics of mind "wandering" strongly suggests metaphorical motion and fluidity, and many examples of mind surfing occur, during listening, while the listener is in motion (e.g., driving, walking, jogging, dancing).The vast majority of Herbert's (2011) phenomenological reports of everyday musical absorption occur in such dynamic circumstances.Mind surfing implies being carried away without losing control or awareness of the forces causing the motion, i.e., the musical experience.Possibly, musicking "affords" a sense of motion within a virtual space (e.g., Changizi 2011;Clarke, Williams & Reynolds, 2018).
When musicking invites to "wandering" or "surfing" it is probably nested within its unique, felt aspect of bodily and temporal motion.Recent research within embodied cognition has argued that our conception of temporal and musical motion are products of the same embodied reasoning (Cox, 2016).Music and time can feel as if they move, although they are not literally changing location.Thus, music arguably yields a particular kind of receptivity which is engaged and sustained by its temporality: as we become musically absorbed, musical time is in charge.Unsurprisingly, music's dynamic, felt, temporally bound, rhythmic, affective "push-and-pull" has been explained by phenomenologists by reference to the Husserlian account of time-consciousness.Salomé Jacob has recently argued that "Husserl's framework of time-consciousness clarifies the anticipatory character of rhythmic experience" (Jacob, 2019, 295), claiming that it applies to all levels of rhythmic anticipation (ibid., 301).Further, in her account of rhythm as experienced -which she terms "rhythm as lived" -Jacob draws on the Dynamic Attending Theory from cognitive science (Large & Jones, 1999) for which entrainment is central.Scholars generally acknowledge that entrainment is powerful: it comes naturally, requires effort to control, is usually implicit, subconscious, and automatic (Brinck, 2017;Clayton et al., 2004;Phillips-Silver et al., 2010).Entrainment is -as Brinck summarises -"the ubiquitous tendency of physical and biological systems to coordinate to autonomous, spatially or temporally structured events or rhythmic movements."(Brinck, 2017, p. 217).The rhythmic organisation of music in time is vital to our experience of it: the way in which rhythm takes hold of attention -the power of entraining -has been described variously as a "drive" (Jones, 2019), or as "energy" (Vara Sanchez, 2023).That the temporal qualities of music dynamically and forcefully engage the whole perceiving system is unsurprising, granted such perspectives that attending to sounds and rhythms is fundamentally embodied (Jacob, 2019) and that temporality seems to be found in all bodily moments and actions (Gallagher, 2013).
To conceive of musical absorption as mind surfing is an attempt to capture such metaphorical and experiential aspects of musicking.When surfing on a real surfboard, one is dependent on the tremendous external force of a wave.Surfing basically consists in managing the coupling with this external force which -like time -cannot be stopped.Both metaphorically and experientially, the relation in musicking is largely the same.One is guided by and coupled with the music; an external powerful wave which is known to strongly affect both mind and body and which -given its timeboundness, and while one is in the forward-moving, temporal experience -cannot be stopped (or it would cease to be a musical experience).Further, surfing is a "sliding" sport (Moreira & Peixoto, 2014), where the "ground" or surface of interaction is unstable and dynamically changing.The landscape is constantly moving while the surfer continuously adjusts the sliding.This involves a sensory-motor interaction with the environment that is different from other athletic disciplines such as running, bicycling, hiking, or even other sliding sports like skiing.We suggest that a similar relation obtains in musicking: when playing, one is constantly on a wave or between waves and there is no stable, Archimedean point to which one can return.Yet, this does not entail that musicians are lost in the musical terrain; different musical genres require training one's familiarity with this ground and its kind of relative stability.

3.3) Is absorption in music listening and performing the same?
Just like one can perform at many levels of expertise, one can listen with various degrees of expertise (from the ordinary muzak encounter in the grocery store to the habitual live-concert attender or even the music producer) and in a plethora of situations, from the concert hall to the grocery store, i.e., to live or recorded music.All performers are arguably listeners too, although not all listeners are performers.Surely, there are differences in the nature and degree of absorption across all these scenarios.While mind surfing might be most strongly instantiated in expert performance and listening, we wish to leave the door open for mind surfing in everyday music listening experience.Here, we again turn to Herbert, whose investigation of the daily listening experiences with 10-18year-olds highlights the: "presence of a distributed attention marked by the use (consciously or unconsciously) of music to mobilize and synthesize different modes of experience" (Herbert, 2019, p. 240).Analysing the account of a teenage girl, Alice, listening to "Bad Girls" by M.I.A, Herbert points to a: "distributed, divided attention in which an inward attentional focus on remembered exotic imagery of the [music] video…occurs simultaneously with an external attentional focus on mundane elements of the surroundings.External and internal phenomena do not appear to interact, but neither are they perceived as conflicting.Music appears to heighten Alice's awareness of everyday details" (ibid).
It is noteworthy that the music drives or "mobilizes" an attention that is divided into both external and internal foci, as in Nørgaard's description of a heightened, detailed imagery of both his own body and the concert hall environment.The argument for a mind-surfing listening, akin to a performative one, comes from the "synthesizing" effect of the music to contain or integrate different modes of experience (exotic imagery and external perceptual focus) that otherwise probably would be discontinuous or even mutually exclusive.We return to musicking's integrative capacity in Section Five.The analysis above shows that mind surfing can occur while listening to or performing music.Whereas the experiential dynamics in the two activities might be qualitatively similar, we believe that the intensity of the mode of experience is probably higher while performing compared to listening only, not least because the demand on the performer's attention is higher and move pervasive.Further, as mind surfing is also coupled to some degree of expertise (also presented in section 5), we would expect clearer examples of mind surfing in expert musicians, who are constantly steeped in both listening and performing.
Having defined our explanandum and pointed to its putative existence across musicking in terms of performance and listening, we now turn to the enabling cognitive functions and conditions that make mind surfing possible as a unique mode of experience.

4) State of the art: attention and mind wandering 4.1) Selective attention
If our attention could be divided into several poles, then we might solve a fundamental puzzle about mind wandering (cf.Irving, 2016).Against our prima facie intuitions, we would thereby claim that we can simultaneously attend to the task at hand while engaging in another experience.Research on spatial attention has clearly shown that attentional focus can be split into non-adjacent, distinct, regions of space and into several foci corresponding to separate objects in the visual field (e.g., Awh & Pashler, 2000;Castiello & Umilta, 1990;Mitroff, Scholl, & Wynn, 2004;Müller, Malinowski, Gruber, & Hillyard, 2003;Somers et al., 1999).If these findings generalise to the musical domain (whether listening or playing), then unrelated stimuli might be processed simultaneously, if both the primary task (musicking) and the irrelevant thoughts towards which the mind wanders do not exceed the limited available capacity or resources of attention.
In the DSQ's "going to Netto" experience, attention to one's own playing is diminished to the point of some minimal keeping track that one plays in sync with the others, while most of the mental 'energy' is spent pondering the items on the shopping list.In mind surfing, however, the listener or player will be attentive in parallel to both the process of musicking and to additional thoughts, feelings or memories that are unintrusive.Although this may look superficially as a "split mind" experience, it seems compatible with an "exploitative" mode of absorption, where one remains on task whilegranted that there is some spare capacity -the primary task can be performed in concert with other thoughts that retain some features of the task.This seems a plausible scenario for a high-level musical expert's phenomenology, particularly that of "ex-static" absorption.

4.2) Intensive attention and mental load
Together with the selective capacity to focus on only one or several targets, another fundamental dimension of attention concerns how intensively one is focussed on the target.As pointed out by the psychologist Patrick Cavanagh (2004), "although we might all know what attention is (James, 1890), we don't all agree on what it does, except that it only does a limited amount of it.This limit, as described by Broadbent (1958), restricts the amount of the available information that can be passed on to higher processing." (p. 13.)This attentional selectivity is clearly adaptive for vision, since it allows the efficient tracking of the continuous (smooth) movements of multiple objects in space (e.g., Alnaes et al., 2014), like when following actions of players in a ball game or the movements of several cars in different lanes.Note, however, that the more objects or events one attends to in such a selective mode, the more cognitive resources will be allocated.This process is neatly reflected in the increasing diameter of the pupil proportional to the increasing load or number of attended items (Alnaes et al., 2014;Laeng & Alnaes, 2019), as anticipated by Kahneman's (1973) original concept of cognitive-limited capacity named the "intensive" aspect of attention.On this view, we can pay or invest attention in different amounts or degrees to one or several objects.Importantly, even if attentional skills can be trained (Spelke, Hirst & Neisser, 1976), there remains an upper limit.Attention has limited capacity, or capacities (e.g., there are suggestions that each cerebral hemisphere has an independent pool of resources; Alvarez, & Cavanagh, 2005), dependent on many factors.These factors range from external ones -like the complexity of the perceived stimuli in the environment and the task demands -to internal ones like domain-specific expertise, physiological arousal, and metabolic constraints of the neural networks involved, aspects which determine the amount of resource one can invest in a particular task at any given time.The concept of limited capacity or attentional intensity remains central in current cognitive neuroscience (e.g., Buschman, Siegel, Roy & Miller, 2011;Ghosh & Maunsell, 2003), including the idea of a central or supramodal capacity limitation (e.g., Reimer & Schubert, 2020).
Intuitively, absorption seems to require an intense state of attention that would supposedly entirely use up the available physiological and mental resources with clear consequences for the degree to which other tasks or concurrent stimuli would be attended (Kahneman, Beatty & Pollack, 1967;Norman & Bobrow, 1975), registered, and remembered.Indeed, intense states of attention should also have deleterious effect on the primary task; as the so-called Easterbrook (1959) effect indicates, increasing arousal reduces the range of cues that are usable in a task, implying increased concentration on relevant cues only up to a point.As commented by Baumeister and Showers (1986) in their review on 'paradoxical performance effects', the "attentional focus is so narrow that even task-relevant cues begin to be ignored" (p.364).
Hence, there is much more to attention than being selective since it can vary from effortful to effortless (Bruya, 2010).This intensive aspect highlights the fact that attention can be allocated in different doses to tasks or objects or events.When the mental load reaches a threshold, there will be measurable costs in processing the tasks, to the point that other concomitant or alternative processes will be either interrupted or slowed down (Holcombe, Chen, & Howe, 2014).
That to which one chooses to attend takes the primary "share" of attentional capacity; but depending on the level of mental load and the remaining amount of "spared" capacities available, one's attention can be captured by other salient objects and events while carrying out the primary task even at efficient levels of performance (Lavie, 2015).The arousal level and type of load involved in the processing of goal-relevant information seems crucial for the degree to which other "distracting" or irrelevant information can simultaneously be attended.Specifically, when one is highly focussed, the processing of extraneous information can be eliminated perceptually (Kahneman, Beatty & Pollack, 1967).This process is mirrored neurally, since neuroimaging reveals that high load on attention leads to the suppression of neural activity within the sensory cortex that normally registers the extra stimuli (Schwartz, Vuilleumier, Hutton, Maravita, Dolan, & Driver, 2005).
Current neurophysiological models relate the level of arousal allocated to performance to switching from a prevalently "exploitation" mode to a prevalently "exploration" mode (Aston-Jones & Cohen, 2005).When one is "on task", the allocation of attention will be optimally directed to the relevant stimuli and processes (exploitation) resulting in an increase in behavioural performance (Cohen, Aston-Jones, & Gilzenrat, 2004).However, when physiological arousal controlled by subcortical regions like the locus coeruleus reaches elevated levels, the allocation of attention will again become suboptimal, leading to a shift away from the exploitation of the stimuli and processes related to the task towards an "exploration" mode that captures attention to off-task events and other, irrelevant, stimuli.Thus, on this view, in both the very low and the very high states of arousal, the mind tends to wander away and performance consequently suffers (Unsworth & Robinson, 2018).
If the above models can be applied to the musical domain, then when musicking does not exhaust attention, other unrelated stimuli will be processed simultaneously.In such situations of low arousal, any capacity not used by the relevant stimuli will involuntarily "spill over" to the perception of any irrelevant stimuli, either external (e.g., the hair style of the person sitting in front in the audience) or internal (e.g., plans for dinner after the performance).Note that in this case, the listener or player may become even more inattentive to the music and may not remember the musical experience very well.However, an increase in the allocation of attentional resources will eventually lead to optimal engagement with the musicking, a state that does not allow for distractions to take over the focus, making it a scenario optimal for episodic memories of the musicking.Nevertheless, an extreme level of arousal (such as during anxiety) will lead the listener or performer to be inattentive to the task at hand, with deteriorating effects on both performance and memory.Mind wandering, then, seems associated with both ends of the arousal continuum and load on capacity, heightened versus diminished, but not with the optimal "exploitative" mode where one is on-task; in the "exploitative" mode, mind wandering towards other irrelevant external or internal events simply cannot happen based on insufficient spare cognitive resources and the motivation to be on-task.
It is important to note that individuals with different levels of expertise will require different levels of effort or cognitive resources in performing the same task, such as for example individuals with good competence in mathematics who will show smaller pupil dilation than individuals with less competence when solving arithmetic problems (Ahern & Beatty, 1979).Hence, the expert performer or listener may well always have some spared resources that can be allocated to other stimuli or thoughts.Indeed, individuals with good working memory capacity (Rummel & Bowitt, 2014;Levinson, Smallwood & Davidson, 2019), are prone to mind wander more in less demanding tasks and show less decrement in performance.According to Lavie's (2005;also, Forster & Lavie, 2008) model of attention, spared capacity will be inevitably used up by something else than the main task and sometimes by concurrently attending to totally irrelevant things.This would suggest that expert musicians -in a state of high arousal when playing -have spare capacity despite being at an optimal "exploitative" mode where they can pay attention to the task at hand but also to their mental images, and importantly without any detrimental effect on their performance.These ideas from cognitive psychology and neuroscience give leeway for the musicking mind to get occupied with something else in addition to music-directed attention.To account for the "wandering" experiential dynamic of the "surfing" of the mind, we now turn to reviewing the research on mind wandering.

4.3) Mind wandering
Imagine finding yourself in an intimate jazz-club.Your engagement with the music spurs fantasies, memories, and imaginations that bleed into one another, in no apparent order, often interspersed with attention to -or discovery of -surprising or pleasant properties of the musical display.Afterwards, a friend asks you what you did during the concert, and you provide an answer sketching the experience along the lines above.She objects that you have wasted your money mind wandering.Given our current perspective, we would find such an objection inappropriate, because this so-called mind wandering would not necessarily exclude highly attentive musicking.
Smallwood and Schooler define mind wandering as "a situation in which executive control shifts away from a primary task to the processing of personal goals . . .[and] often occurs without intention…or even awareness that one's mind has drifted" (2006, p. 946).Their original definition of mind wandering has been criticised for a lack of precision, an aspect which they sought to refine in later publications (Smallwood & Schooler, 2014).In fact, mind wandering has also many qualities, connected to aspects such as relaxation and creativity (Fox & Christoff, 2018).
Nevertheless, let us situate the original definition of mind wandering above in the context a jazz-club setting where you are listening to a complex rhythmical pattern and your mind wanders between memories and fantasies.Now, we prima facie recognise this as mind wandering, but does it meet Smallwood & Schooler's original definition?In other words, is this a shift away from the primary task?To match the definition, we would have to define the primary task of listening to music very narrowly, as solely the perceptual directedness to the musical sounds and -this being a live settingperhaps to the movements of the musicians.Such a narrow definition would exclude other aspects of the experience, such as the mental and emotional engagement with the perceived meaning, intention, or narrative of the music, or its aesthetics.
Conversely, if we instead widen our definition of the primary task of listening to music to encompass the imaginative, narrative, and emotional intentionality and affectivity, then it no longer counts as mind wandering.In other words, Smallwood & Schooler's definition hinges on how we define the 'primary' task, and that surely depends on the context of the experience.If defined too narrowly, seemingly essential mental processes are excluded from the primary task.If defined too widely, almost any mental process could be considered as belonging to the primary process (see Kukkonen, 2019, for a similar criticism).In some of his most recent work, Schooler does acknowledge the conceptual and methodological challenges surrounding the notion of task (e.g., Murray et. al. 2020).
We can compare this notion of mind wandering with mind surfing.Here is an example from the DSQ violinist, Rune Sørensen, while performing in his folk-band, "Dreamer's Circus": "We have a piece where Nicolai plays the melody through the first time and I have to join in [after].But I do not join in.I am in a completely different place.My girlfriend Martha was flying on her way to LA and I was thinking about where the hell she is now."Is she over Iceland or has she already come to Greenland?"And then suddenly it was too late.Then I looked at Nicolai and thought, "oh my god, what the hell, I have forgotten to join in" and tried in a musical way to fight my way back into the right mentality and focus on that I am standing on stage now and come back into the music."(Høffding, 2019, p. 78) Mind wandering, as exemplified here, presents intrusive and disruptive thoughts arising independently of the musicking.In contrast to this experience of disruption, mind surfing extrudes or exudes from the musicking as a constructive (enriching) process where the extra thoughts and feelings match some of the features of the primary task (e.g., its motions in a virtual space), as surfing the wave involves entrainment with the qualities and dynamics of that wave.
What is a musician's primary task, then?Is it listening, is it reading the score, proprioceptively feeling the position and movement of one's fingers and hands?Or does it, like in the case of listening or reading, involve imagining landscapes, settings, colours, movements and kinesthetics, producing certain emotional expressions, remembering loved ones?In fact, even when intensely focussing attention to listening and enjoying the proprioceptive feeling of placing one's fingers in just the right spots, with just the right ensuing perfectly pitched tone or chord, the DSQ members frequently account for a simultaneous experience of fantasies, memories, and emotions.These experiential aspects exist in causal loops with the sonic properties and meanings of the actual music, such that a particular imagination might change the quality of the tone, which again may lead to new imagery and so on.
On Schooler and Smallwood's original definition of mind wandering, how shall we offer a distinction between whether fantasy belongs to the primary task or whether it is an extraneous act of mind wandering?Many of Schooler and Smallwood's examples take place in the context of a non-aesthetic text's reading comprehension, for which the primary task can easily be defined.But if the definition of mind wandering depends on a relative simplicity of the domain of application, it will fail to apply to more complex human domains such as musicking, for which the nature of the primary task cannot so easily be captured.Seeing that mind wandering occurs in all kinds of contexts in everyday life, its definition ought to be tailored such that it is more broadly applicable, even to the special case of attention to aesthetic objects and creativity.
In their comment on Smallwood and Schooler, philosophers Irving and Thompson (2018) suggest that mind wandering is best seen as "unguided thinking".Echoing this sentiment, several protagonists of the mind wandering research paradigm have recently jointly argued that it is likely impossible to give an exhaustive definition of mind wandering: "We propose that the field acknowledge mind wandering to be a multidimensional and fuzzy construct encompassing a family of experiences with common and unique features" (Seli et al., 2018, p. 482).
Rather than attempting to offer a coherent definition of mind wandering, our aim is to make it intelligible how -and to what extent -intensive attention and mind wandering can be seen to relate among the varieties of musical absorption.As pointed out by Irving, "mind wandering may be a choice point between contemporary accounts of attention."(2016, p.563).Thus, in the domain of cognitive neuroscience it may be theoretically incoherent to attempt to directly integrate attention (a primary process) with mind wandering (a secondary, conjoint process).This incoherence, in turn, may be part of what explains the paradoxical nature of the portrayal of musical absorption (as seen in Lange, Zweck &Sinn, 2017, andVroegh, 2019).
In the following model (illustrated in Figure 1), we propose that different types of mind wandering, as well as mind surfing, naturally emerge from the combination of two deep variables of attention: intensive attention and selective attention.The proposed 2x2 model resembles a previous model in a review by Smallwood and Schooler (2015), where the fundamental dimensions are whether a) the content is related/unrelated to the task and b) perceptually guided or self-generated.However, the present model differs by focusing on fundamental attentional aspects and by being less tied to the standard laboratory situation of reading, where the thought's contents can be clearly defined as being on-task or-off task or externally/internally guided, based in participant's reports and their taskrelated performance levels.In musicking, such aspects seem too constraining and, as mentioned, being on-task may be undefinable.
In our model, we suggest that the two fundamental aspects of attention -the selective and the intensive (Kahneman, 1973) -constitute the attentional enabling conditions for at least four distinguishable modes of experience during musicking.Two of these correspond to a pair of distinguishable types of mind wandering that have already been described in the literature (left side of the vignette), although not always teased apart.Another two correspond, respectively, to the socalled "on-task" mode and to the here-proposed, distinguishable mode of mind surfing.

Figure 1. The vignette illustrates a 2x2 model of different modes of experience encountered in performative musicking, depending on a) how intensively attention is allocated to the musicking (the horizontal "intensive attention" aspect); and b) whether the attention focus is on one stream of information only or two simultaneously (the vertical "selective attention" aspect).
In the upper left corner, we have low selection in attention to the musicking and low intensity of allocation to it.Thus, the mind can be decoupled from the musicking and can be mostly engaged in the wandering.This type of mind wandering typically includes content that is unrelated to the musicking, as when constructing the shopping list for the "Netto" supermarket or wondering about one's partner's itinerary to LA.According to Irving (2016), this mode of mind wandering characterizes the folk idea of mind wandering as "unguided and without design", as already suggested centuries ago by the philosopher Thomas Hobbes in 1651, in his chapter on the "Trayne of Thoughts."It can also be called daydreaming and bears some similarities to what scholars have called "tuning-out" (e.g., Vroegh, 2019), where there is some minimal meta-awareness present in the sense that the wanderer can report on the contents of the awareness afterwards, or even "zoning out" (Smallwood, McSpadden & Schooler, 2008), when meta-awareness is so low that the wanderer is not able to report on it or recognize it afterwards.
In the lower left corner, we likewise have low intensity of attention and attentional allocation to musicking, but with a plural focus.Selective attention is split between the musical stream and imagination with no clear attentional guidance from the music.Because the attentional allocation to the music is low, there is spare capacity for intrusive and irrelevant thoughts, like in the condition of low perceptual load in Lavie's (2005) attentional model, where spared attentional resources necessarily spill over to "distractors", in our case not necessarily in the perceptual field but other fields self-originating in imagery.An example of this experiential mode, relation to musicking, might be recollecting past episodes linked to the music or some aspects of it (e.g., a romantic dinner with one's partner, followed by imagery related to the person but not to the unfolding of the music) or the flat sense of "another day at the job" in which a weakly engaged attention can flicker away.We believe that also this mode should be considered a form of mind wandering, since the plural focus has its own dynamics, unguided by the music which remains present in the mind.
In the upper right corner, we have a highly intensive attention that is fully centred on the musicking.In some previous accounts, the availability of attentional and executive resources and the fact that they are limited has been explicitly highlighted (e.g., Brosowsky, Murray, Schooler & Seli, 2021).This mode embodies the romantic notion of the absorbed artist forgetting all sense of space, time, and self, which Høffding describes as "absorbed-not-being there" (Høffding, 2019).In the context of listening, this mode may correspond to what Vroegh (2019, p. 161) also calls "zoning-in" and describes in terms of a "high degree of attentional focus together with a relatively high degree of altered awareness but, in relation to all other clusters…the lowest value for being meta-aware while listening."It is consistent with a mode of highly selective and intensive attentive allocation needed for performing a challenging and difficult task (Brosowsky, Murray, Schooler & Seli, 2021) or when the neurocognitive system is in "exploitation" mode (Cohen, Aston-Jones, & Gilzenrat, 2004).
Finally, in the lower right quadrant, we find attention intensely allocated to the musicking but at the same time divided into more than one focus.Marked by a heightened perceptive and interoceptive awareness, it is characterized by a peculiar kind of self-distance that justifies the label "ex-static" absorption.It nicely matches Vroegh's (2019, p. 161) definition of "tuning in", and in contrast to zoning-in, this mode similarly has a high score on attentional focus and an equivalent level of altered awareness but is significantly higher in meta-awareness while listening."It also converges with Russ Hurlburt's (2011) findings with the expert guitarist Richardo Cobo, labelled as "autonomous multiplicity" where consciousness apparently splits into several strands.Importantly, this selfdistance or high meta-awareness is coupled with the music in ways that are best captured by the concept of mind surfing.It resembles mind wandering in its dynamics, because attention and its content evolves over time through constant transitions (Irving, 2016), but it is not a type or mode of mind wandering because it does not drift away from the music, but it is guided by it while unfolding.
The above model of experiential modes in musicking confirms that there are at least two different kinds of mind wandering (upper and lower left quadrant) and, further, that we can understand these along the more fundamental axes of intensive and selective attention as the enabling cognitive conditions.Importantly, we suggest that mind surfing is different from the two modes of mind wandering as it engages the attention intensively but splits it into simultaneously occurring plural foci.On this view, attention can be selected into at least two simultaneous streams, within the limits of current available resources, which however are flexibly modulated by changes in arousal levels (Kahneman, 1973) and the level of expert perceptual skills (Spelke, Hirst & Neisser, 1976).Such selectivity to a wide and dynamic attentional field is one of the enabling conditions for mind surfing as well as for the "unguided", but still attentively divided, mode of mind wandering (in the bottom left quadrant).
While it may be that the interplay of the different forms of attention provides a cognitive condition of possibility for mind surfing, we still need to explain its phenomenology.The musicians' descriptions of mind surfing have an irreducibly receptive and affective dynamic that is not capturable in active It is not without reason that the sources in Section 2 of this paper collectively associate absorption with mind wandering.In other words, if the mind is fully focused using all mental resources on the musicking, from whence comes the feeling of wandering or surfing?

5) Explaining mind surfing through musical scaffolding
We are advancing the view that the musicking agent, in intense states of absorption, can be both experiencing intense attention directed at the performative situation, and be attentionally selective, allowing her to muse, to hover above, or surf on the musical wave.But how is such a thing possible and why does the coupling of intensive and selective attention give rise to the affective experience of mind surfing?Phenomenological work on bodily expertise posits a heightened body schematic functioning (Gallagher 2005) or even a special form of pre-reflective bodily self-awareness, labelled "performative awareness" (Legrand, 2007;Legrand & Ravn, 2009).Applied to musicking, the existence of this kind of awareness means that affective and bodily intentionality ought to take centre stage in our grasp of musical absorption.Deriving initially from Husserl's "operative intentionality" (Husserl, 2008(Husserl, /1916-37) -37) and Merleau-Ponty's "motor intentionality" (Merleau-Ponty, 2004/1945), this kind of mindedness -unlike ordinary mental intentionality -is not capturable as directed toward one specific intentional object.Instead, it denotes the practical and embodied attunement to a situation or directedness toward a future action.In other words, in phenomenology we cannot reduce awareness to (object-)attention.As performative musicking is characterized by a particularly heightened bodily awareness as well as a diffuse primary task which distributes attention in complex ways, it is not surprising that intensive and selective attention alone are insufficient for capturing musical absorption.
Understanding musicking as an inherently embodied activity takes us from classical phenomenology into the terrain of viewing consciousness as embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended (i.e., 4E cognition; Newen, De Bruin & Gallagher, 2018).Accepting this position gives us explanatory resources to posit that musicking extends our cognitive capacities.It is exactly through this extension that we find the explanatory power to make intelligible that intensive and selective attention can couple with the temporally bound, ever forward-moving music, accounting for the phenomenology of mind surfing.In other words, 4E cognition will allow us to claim that the embodied mind's powerful coupling with music can enact a new mode of experience.
The term "extension", however, is ambiguous and can refer to (at least) two distinguishable dimensions.Firstly, the mind can be extended in a spatial sense, as when part of a cognitive process is realized or off-loaded to outside of the head.Here the classic example from Clark and Chalmer (1998), would be "Otto" who uses his notebook to supplement his own failing memory.Secondly, the mind can be augmented or enhanced as a result of a certain coupling.Again, Otto's capacity to remember times, places and plans is augmented -made more powerful -as a result of his notebook use.We believe that musicking realizes both dimensions of extension, though "mind surfing" emphasizes the latter.Firstly, we get spatial extension insofar as musical scores, structures, instruments and co-performers enable the musicians' realization of various cognitive processes.For instance, the information necessary for performing Beethoven's string quartet opus 131, is partially stored in the body schema, in the score, in the violin and in the other musicians.But more importantly, we get augmentation insofar as musicking provides the necessary scaffold for the particular fusing of selective and intensive attention or between heightened attention and the "wandering" dynamic.Indeed, Krueger and Colombetti (2018) argue for the existence of music as an "affective scaffold" that affords mental self-regulation, as for example music streaming in background, while working out in the gym, can scaffold our attention, affect, and behavior.That is, some of the mental resources necessary for self-regulation can be offloaded to the environment and onto the musical worlds we inhabit (Krueger, 2019).In this way, music extends and co-constitutes parts of our affectivity, thus freeing up mental resources that would otherwise be necessary for such regulation.
In other words, musicking can enhance our mental capacities.Where Krueger writes of affective scaffolds, we believe that musicking -for the ex-statically absorbed musician or listener -can provide an affective as well as a cognitive scaffold availing the necessary mental resources for mind surfing.As mentioned, musicking is an optimal entrainment activity.As we entrain, mental resources are off-loaded to the music and its rhythmicity as well as to the extended (in the sense of spatial) cognitive carriers (body schema, score, instrument, and co-performers), thus freeing up resources that would otherwise be necessary for cognitive and affective regulation.Thus, it is likely that the ability to use music as scaffolding mind surfing requires training: mind surfing would arguably occur more frequently for the expert musician and the trained listener than for the novice, since expertise can be characterized by a more efficient, quasi-automatic and seemingly "effortless" mode of sensory-motor processing (See Montero, 2016, Christensen, Sutton & McIlwain, 2016).The extensive training has tuned perception to the most relevant information in a specific domain (e.g., Biederman & Shiffrar, 1987) while disregarding the less relevant.Chunking information and switching to a more holistic processing is also often invoked in expertise (e.g., Wong & Gauthier, 2010).This refining of attention and perception, independently of the domain of expertise, may result in freeing some processing space (as discussed earlier) for other stimuli and, in the case of mind surfing, for imagery.
As mentioned, a necessary condition for mind surfing is the musically entrained coupling between attentiveness and wandering.Mind wandering may take no effort, but it will not lead to mind surfing in and of itself.Attention is strenuous and it is usually from there that mind surfing will develop, as reflected in the previously mentioned description by Nørgaard of his reading I.P. Jakobsen.Doing so, he needs time and effort to get into "the zone" in which he can then flip around between the pages while surfing the narrative arch.
The notion of music as affective scaffolding offers the needed explanatory power for the framework proposed here.The coupling of intensive and selective attention may not be possible in normal situations because it would exceed our cognitive and perhaps affective capacity.But in musicking, this spare capacity is provided by the cognitive and affective scaffold to music, thereby enabling and sustaining mind surfing.

6) Conclusion
Work in music psychology has been offering prevailing paradoxical accounts of musical absorption as associated with both intensive attention and mind wandering or as split into several kinds without attempts at an integration.To offer a corrective to predominant scholarly pursuits, we have selected one kind of absorption experienced by expert musicians -ex-static absorption -as the foundation for our investigative account and then clarified how interactive degrees of intensive and selective attention enable a mode of experience that we call mind surfing.Based on foundational work from cognitive psychology on different varieties of attention, we have integrated distinct ideas on musical absorption from varying traditions (such as Lange, Zweck & Sinn, 2017;Herbert, 2019;Hurlburt, 2011;Høffding, 2019;Vroegh, 2019), thereby providing a new, more robust conceptual way forward.
Mind surfing is challenging to explain in terms of current cognitive science if we consider cognition entirely brain-bound or if we narrowly reduce awareness to attention.Thinking abductively, with an inference to the best explanation, we propose instead turning to 4E cognition and ecological psychology, considering music as an affective and cognitive scaffold.Some of the cognitive demands of simultaneously selective and intensive attention is scaffolded by the music.Without it, one gets disjointed mental processes of either standard intensive attention or a form of mind wandering (characterized by non-intensive attention).As a cognitive niche, musicking enables the process of mind surfing and thereby concretely expands our mental capacities.
To clarify the explanatory reach of mind surfing, we claim that music is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the integration of intensive and selective attention into mind surfing.The necessary condition is a great external force with which the subject can couple and entrain; for a subject's musical experience, the temporally bound nature of music is fundamental for the kinds of absorption it affords.In literary absorption, the coupling force be the narrative arch as demonstrated by Kukkonen, but it would be less temporally bound than music.We might find similar perspectives in other accounts of aesthetic experience: our focus on selective attention seems consistent with Bence Nanay's (2015) description of aesthetic experience emphasizing "distributed attention".Further, what we have termed mind surfing would be compatible with John Dewey's "doing and undergoing" (Dewey, 1980) or Mikel Dufrenne's "adherent reflection" (Dufrenne, 1979;cf. Høffding, Vara Sanchez & Roald, 2022).Here, the composition and structure of the work of art would constitute the necessary external force ("the wave") acting as cognitive and affective scaffold.Given musicking's unique, dynamic, moving, and temporal qualities, its distinctive form of mind surfing probably also has unique experiential characteristics.
In analysing and defining mind surfing, we have dealt with but one of many forms of musical absorption, namely absorption as a selective and ex-static mode of experience.While other modes of musical experience might be equally complex and fascinating, we believe that it is to mind surfing that we should turn if we wish to understand and resolve the absorption paradox.We hope that the conceptual disentanglements provided here can contribute to advancing our understanding of the phenomenological and cognitive underpinnings of absorption in general, and of musical absorption in particular.