This is easy to play as a “news of the weird” piece, but having spent lots of time studying the benefits of mind-wandering and restorative activities, I can’t help but take a slightly more serious approach to news of the third Space Out Contest, recently held in a park in Seoul, South Korea. Korea, as The Guardian notes, is a country where 80% of people have smartphones, and

a growing fixation on everything digital seen as a serious problem. The country’s smartphone users spend an average of four hours a day tweeting, chatting or playing games, with about 15% showing symptoms of addiction, according to state data.

The 2014 contest drew fifty people who competed to see who could be the best at “just spacing out without thinking about anything:”

The people sponsoring event stated, “It is an experience in which you really distance yourself from the stress of a quick-paced and competitive society.” The criteria for this competition was to do nothing and be as still as possible. The winner would be the person with the most stable and steady heart rate, which would be the measuring instrument for this competition.

People who were doing anything but spacing out, whether they were listening to music, on their phones, reading, sleeping, or dozing off, were eliminated.

It sounds as if the participants were judged using heart monitors or some kind of wearable device, so they weren’t completely “disconnected” in the most formal sense (who is these days?), but still it was an opportunity for them to let their minds do nothing.

This year’s winner was a local rap star, which might tell you something about the slightly odd place of rap in Korean popular culture:

“I was so exhausted physically and mentally while preparing an album, so I just wanted to relax for a while,” said Shin Hyo-Seob, aka Crush. “This event is highly recommended for those who have migraines or complicated thoughts,” the 28-year-old said, holding his glass trophy.

It’s easy to make light of an event like this, but chances are if you think about it for a minute, you may realize that the number of times you actually allow your mind to wander are pretty few and far between these days. Look around you the next time you’re in line at the store, or waiting for the barista to fill your order: chances are most of the people around you will been their phones. Rather than take opportunities to let our mind do nothing at all, to just clear and calm down, we instead fill those times with what Samuel Johnson called “the appearance of business“, or alternately listicles and cat videos.

This is a shame, because when we allow them, our minds seem to get a lot out of doing what feels like nothing. We can mind-wander in the milliseconds it takes us to blink; as Michael Corballis puts it, our brains are programmed to mind-wander. You have to figure that something our brains gravitate to so naturally has benefit.

And of course, it does: unlike distraction, mind-wandering contributes to our self-understanding, resilience, and creativity. People who are really creative seem to learn how to shift between focus and mind-wandering states, and there’s some very compelling evidence (which I discuss in one of the chapters of the book) that the default mode networks of creative people (the brain networks that activate when we’re mind-wandering) incorporate areas that they also use when they’re working– which means they spend both conscious and unconscious time processing problems (one hesitates to say “thinking about,” since it’s not all self-directed and conscious).

So while a contest to see who can space out most effectively seems strange, we should approve of anything that allows us to mind-wander a little more.