Students, employees or children in front of the window have long been criticized for “going off into the moon”. However, the work of psychologists from Harvard, who followed thousands of people by smartphone, shows that the brain drifts towards this mental parenthesis nearly 46.9% of waking time. What seemed like a chronic distraction might just be one of the great hidden drivers of memory, thinking and creativity.
This habit has a name: daydreaming, or daydreaming. Recent research, published in particular in the journal
Naturelink it to better brain health, more flexible thinking and lower stress. In other words, what school passed off as laziness looks more like free brain training. The whole challenge now is to understand what is going on in your head during these moments when you switch off.
When daydreaming prepares the brain for the future
When idle, a set of regions called the default mode network activates. It connects the medial prefrontal cortex, the hippocampus and areas involved in memory and imagination. Nghia D. Nguyen, at Harvard Medical School, observed in mice that certain cells in the visual cortex reactivated on their own after a flash of light. “Reactivations at the start of a session systematically differed from the pattern evoked by the previous stimulus, they more closely resembled the response patterns of future stimuli,” explained Nghia D. Nguyen.
These reactivations follow “sharp-wave ripples” in the hippocampus (or sharp hippocampal waves) which are waves already known to consolidate learning. Neuroscientists see it as a sort of dress rehearsal: daydreaming not only replays the past, it adjusts the brain to what could happen. Another team even observed, in 27 volunteers, that mental wandering associated with “local sleep” increased implicit learning without harming immediate performance.
Reverie, memory and reflection: a break that makes you more effective
Psychologist Erin Wamsley showed that after memorizing a list of words, ten minutes of silent rest improved recall the next day more than ten minutes of videos. During this waking calm, the brain transfers recent information to long-term memory. Taking a short daydream break after a class, meeting or podcast therefore gives the brain the window it needs to sort and stabilize what has just been learned.
Mind wandering also helps with complex thinking. Experiments where participants were allowed to daydream before solving anagrams showed that they found more solutions than those who remained focused without pause. In the background, the default mode network combines memories, goals and emotions to bring new avenues to the surface. This is exactly what allows you to “let an important decision settle” instead of going around in circles.
Creativity, stress and good limits of daydreaming
For Benjamin Baird, who asked volunteers to imagine as many uses as possible for a brick after a boring task, the link is clear : “Daydreaming promotes creativity because the brain’s ability to establish new connections between seemingly unrelated concepts is increased during episodes of daydreaming”indicated Benjamin Baird. Functional MRI work led by Kalina Christoff shows that, in these moments, planning areas connect to memory and imagination regions. No wonder so many ideas arise in the shower, while walking, or while doing the dishes, as researchers at the University of Virginia described.