"irrelevant thoughts" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
It can be used to refer to thoughts or ideas that are not related to the current topic or situation. For example: - "I couldn't focus on the lecture because my mind kept getting filled with irrelevant thoughts." - "The book was filled with long paragraphs of irrelevant thoughts that didn't add anything to the story." - "During my meditation, I tried to clear my mind of any irrelevant thoughts and just focus on my breathing."
(This wasn't one of the usual irrelevant thoughts that came to his mind when he saw tourists wandering around, gawking, showing disrespect not only for the place they were in but for themselves, too, in the way they walked, wobble-footed, talking too loud and looking too quickly).
Just because a person chooses not to speak out of turn, or abruptly blurt out, what are often irrelevant, thoughts, does not mean that they do not have opinions of their own.
The NBRS measures self-observed alertness, distractibility, intrusion of irrelevant thoughts, coherence of conversion, anxiety, tension, disinhibitory behavior, motor behavior and expressive/receptive language ability.
Balance Your Mind Settle down your mind, cast off unbalanced and irrelevant thoughts, and find its spiritual Middle-Chi.
Do not let yourself be carried away by irrelevant thoughts or associated thoughts that might arise, such as about the shop were you bought it, about how and where it was grown, its nutritive value, etc. Stay calm, while trying to ignore these thoughts and not be interested in them.
And that's not an irrelevant thought, as we look back at the financial scandals of the past few decades.
The aim of meditative practices is to "reduce or eliminate irrelevant thought processes through training of internalized attention" [ 15].
Existing research shows that stress affects performance by the impairment of memory retrieval and by cognitive interference and task-irrelevant thoughts (e.g., Cornelisse et al. 2011; Eysenck et al. 2007; Vogel and Schwabe 2016).
Furthermore, research on test anxiety shows that working under stress impairs attention and produces cognitive interference and task-irrelevant thoughts that result in reduced levels of task performance (Deffenbacher 1978; Eysenck et al. 2007).
Another possibility is that RT slowing reflects a distracting influence of task-irrelevant thoughts elicited by emotional cues, which compete for processing resources.
The suggestion is that difficulties in both proactive interference and interference from habitual and distracting task-irrelevant thoughts (as found in those with a history of PTSD) can be seen as different exemplars of a broader interference vulnerability.
