Daydreaming — goofing off, or what?
Is daydreaming, rather than being just a form of goofing off, the mechanism by
which the brain processes learn material while awake? Would this process
be akin to needing actual sleep to process memories? If so, could this
account for the eccentricity of people such as Thomas Edison who were always
taking cat naps?
Grady,
Navarre, Florida, USA
We daydream for about one-third of our waking hours. Photo courtesy of Melodi2.
We don't know why people daydream. Your processing-memories
suggestion, though, is a fairly good guess.
To clear up nomenclature: daydreams are thoughts we have when we
voluntarily shift from thoughts stimulated by our senses or the task at hand to
thoughts our brain generates, independently.
A functional magnetic resonance image of one cortex region in the daydreaming
network. The light
color indicates the active region of the network. Image courtesy of Malia
Mason et al. and Dartmouth University.
Recently a team of neuroscientists identified what part of the brain implements
daydreaming. In January 2007, the
team (composed of researchers from Dartmouth College, Harvard, the University of
California and University of Aberdeen) reported on a network of regions in the
brain's cortex that are active when we daydream. Moreover, when we stop
daydreaming to focus on an intense task, like working a puzzle, we essentially
stop using the 'daydream' network. The researchers found that a brain
focusing on a "high executive demand" task lessens
activity in the 'daydreaming' network — essentially turning it off, says Malia
F. Mason, presently a professor at the Columbia School of Business and a member of the team.
The study was part of her dissertation at Dartmouth.
Furthermore, other researchers at the Washington University in St. Louis found
one task that the brain both focuses on, and uses the daydreaming network. People
trying to remember what they had for breakfast, for
example, might use part of the daydreaming network, says team member
Cindy Lustig. So, perhaps autobiographical memory and daydreaming are
related. We don't know yet.
In fact, Mason and the rest of the team muse why mind-wandering thoughts occur at all.
Maybe daydreaming helps us carry out mundane tasks, because a
wandering mind is still aroused. Or, perhaps
daydreams are a kind of "mental time travel" that help us tie together our past,
present and future experiences. Or, maybe the mind wanders "simply because it
can."
Also, the mind wanders to solve problems, as perhaps Thomas Edison's mind did.
Mark Twain and Edgar Allan Poe wrote stories based on their daydreams. The
chemist Friedrich Kekule, in that half-awake state we enter before falling
asleep, daydreamed of two serpents biting each other's tail, and forming a ring.
He jolted awake, and saw the answer to how a benzene molecule is structured.
It's a ring!
By the way, we all daydream for about one-third of our waking hours, according
to Eric Klinger, a clinical psychologist at the University of Minnesota.
Further Reading:
What is a dream? WonderQuest
Wandering minds: the default network and stimulus-independent thought
by Malia F. Mason, Michael I. Norton, John D. Van Horn, Daniel M. Wegner, Scott
T. Grafton and C. Neil Macrae. Science, 315, 393 (2007).
Brain's 'resting' network offers powerful new method for early Alzheimer's
dagnosis by
Gerry Everding on work done by Cindy Lustig, Abraham Z Snyder, Mehul Bhakta,
Katherine C O'Brien, Mark McAvoy, Marcus E Raichle, John C Morris, & Randy L
Buckner (2003) and reported in Functional deactivations: Change with age and
dementia of the Alzheimer type. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
USA 100, 14504-14509.
Consciousness and Eric Klinger's daydreaming time study
Inventing benzene,
Engines of our Ingenuity
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