VANCOUVER: Contrary to common opinion, daydreaming is not slacking off because when the brain wanders it is working even harder to solve problems, new research has shown.
Scientists scanned the brains of people lying inside magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines, as they alternately pushed buttons or rested.
The scans showed that the "default network" deep inside a human brain becomes more active during daydreaming.
Complex problem-solving
But in a surprise finding the scans also revealed intense activity in the executive network, the outlying region of the brain associated with complex problem-solving, said neuroscientist Kalina Christoff.
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4 Comments
This makes sense to me although many people think daydreaming is just a form of goofing off. Daydreaming is very creative thought without restraint. The brain is allowed to wander to places it isn't allowed to when we restrict it to thinking about one thought. Most problems need a creative solution and its during daydreaming when the brain is relaxed and allowed to roam that those creative solutions can appear. I bet the brain is in the same mode during daydreaming as it is when we are a sliver away from sleep - also a time when solutions to problems seem to pop into our minds.
I totaly agree with your comments. I also see some similarities to a computers screensaver, which is some cases can be used to do a kind of maintenance work, disc defrag. Maybe daydreaming is the brains way of defragging itself, and as a byproduct it discovers lingering thoughts/ files which can become useful - aka creativity?
Ah ha! Clearing out all the dead space and reorganizing the data in a way that we can make more sense of it.
You understand! :-) Nice to be understood.
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