The Wandering Mind

that catapulted monks past their minds’ usual horizons, by offering glimpses of the divine logic that structured all of creation. Metacognition did not have to mean closing the mind up to itself. It could actually widen monks’ perspective beyond themselves, beyond their minds and memories and books and bodies and communities and world, to encompass

Some monks visualized not only their thoughts but also themselves thinking those thoughts, as a way to reframe their prayers and keep them from meandering.

the monks saw it as a gift. To their minds, thinking about thinking was not a distraction at all. It was the ultimate way to steady the self.

ULTIMATELY THE PRACTICE of meditation was supposed to produce a perpetual state of attentiveness.

But more advanced meditatio involved linking memories together and in the process “remembering”

Minds that meditated were supposed to warm up, jump, stretch, hold tight. They made cognitive connections that felt like gathering flowers, concocting a medicine, or building something from salvage. Monks could meditate while they read, or go off-book. The most basic meaning of meditatio was memorization.

To meditate on a concept, to think about what something was or meant, a monk searched her memory for something related to it. Then she’d build on that association, and the next, and the next. The goal was a gradual agglomeration of memories that evolved into something much more revealing than any single-sided view could be. It was an exploratory, p

the memory was also the very instrument that she used to design and build new mental structures from the materials she had at hand.2 In Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, the memory was where monks did some of their most complex concentrating. To do that, monks learned how the memory worked—rather than treat it like a black box, as we often