It’s daydreaming when the mind wanders
Daydreaming – a happy state for many – seems to be the default setting of the human mind and certain brain regions are devoted to it. When people are given a specific task to do, they focus on that task but then other brain regions get busy during the down time, US researchers report in the latest issue of the journal Science.
“There is this network of regions that always seems to be active when you don’t give people something to do,” says psychologist Dr Malia Mason of Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital.
When Dr Mason asked people what was happening during this down time, the answer was clear. “It’s daydreaming. But I find that the vast majority of time, people aren’t having fanciful thoughts. People are thinking about what they have to do later.”
In a “wandering and flitting” exercise with 19 students the researchers found that “in the absence of a task that requires deliberative processing, the mind generally tends to wander, flitting from one thought to the next with fluidity and ease”.
“Although the thoughts the mind produces when wandering are at times useful, such instances do not prove that the mind wanders because these thoughts are adaptive; on the contrary the mind may wander simply because it can,” the researchers concluded.
