If you find yourself sitting around, trying to concentrate, and then just… sorry, what were we talking about here? Oh yes, dozing off and daydreaming. It’s a fun way to pass the time and a great way to fantasise your goals, but now new research is proving that it could also be proof that you’re smarter and more creative than people who don’t fantasise throughout the day.
In a new study published in the journal Neuropsychologia, researchers revealed that people who daydream actually have more efficient brains, so no more of those “low attention span” rumours!
Yeah, this might be just as great as the news that eating ice cream for breakfast makes you smarter. Truth be told, we’ll take both.
And if taking time to daydream about that next vacation or that upcoming date can raise our fluid intelligence and creativity, as the study shows, all the better for us.
“People with efficient brains may have too much brain capacity to stop their minds from wandering,” Eric Schumacher, the study’s co-author tells Science Daily.
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In the study, which included more than 100 participants, people had their brains scanned in an MRI machine for five minutes, in which the researchers monitored their intelligence, executive function, and mind wandering a.k.a. daydreaming.
They the discovered that the default mode network (DMN) of the brain became most activated when people weren’t focusing on any task in particular and instead showed that it became alerted when people’s minds were wandering.
And it’s all because taking that mental break — and processing information however you chose — actually allowed for you to better organise your thoughts, leading to increased creativity later.
“People tend to think of mind wandering as something that is bad. You try to pay attention and you can’t,” said Schumacher. “Our data are consistent with the idea that this isn’t always true. Some people have more efficient brains.”
“People tend to think of mind wandering as something that is bad. You try to pay attention and you can’t,” said Schumacher. “Our data are consistent with the idea that this isn’t always true. Some people have more efficient brains.”
And if daydreaming is how we get them, consider us in.
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