- Daydreaming may often be seen as the ultimate time-wasting activity. However, researchers are now showing that letting your mind wander may have more benefits than previously thought.
- A recent study from Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary has found that allowing your mind to wander while engaged in a simple task may actually improve learning.
- More than that, participants who allowed themselves to daydream during a simple task were able to complete it just as effectively as those who had remained focused on the activity throughout.
“Mind wandering poses an unresolved puzzle for cognitive neuroscience: It is associated with poor performance in various cognitive domains, yet humans spend 30–50% of their waking time mind wandering.”
So claim the authors of a recent study published in The Journal of Neuroscience, citing previous literature on this topic.
Lead author Péter Simor, PhD, and his colleagues from Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary, however, were keen on challenging assumptions that daydreaming negatively affects performance.
“The idea to study the potentially beneficial influence of mind wandering on information processing occurred to us during the COVID pandemic, when we had plenty of time to mind wander,” Simor told Medical News Today on a lighthearted note.
Further, the researchers were “inspired by the studies of local sleep indicating that sleep in a regionally and temporally localized manner can occur in the waking brain, and were also enthusiastic about the studies of Thomas Andrillon and colleagues, who showed that mind wandering […] [is] related to local sleep occurring in wakefulness.”
Put simply, daydreaming, as its name aptly suggests, is a form of “wakeful rest,” so Simor and his collaborators believed that, just like any form of rest, it may actually help give the brain a little “boost.”
“We hypothesized that mind wandering linked to local sleep might not have only negative impacts, but may also facilitate information processing, especially in tasks that do not require effortful attention and which are learned without conscious awareness. If mind wandering facilitates learning in probabilistic learning — which is what we observed — perhaps there is no more room for post-learning sleep to improve performance. Maybe these kinds of learning do not require sleep at all, because information is processed during practice and episodes of mind wandering.”
– Péter Simor, PhD
Still, mind wandering is not just the same as sleep, Simor and his colleague, Dezső Németh, PhD, the study’s senior author, cautioned.
“By ‘rest’ during wake we refer to a state when the brain transiently decouples from the demands of the external environment to engage in internally dominated cognitive processes,” Simor and Németh explained for MNT.
“Nevertheless, this disconnection is just transient and limited in time and space (brain regions), therefore it just resembles some aspects of sleep, but it is markedly different from sleep,” they added.
To find out how letting your mind wander actually impacts cognition, they designed a study where 27 participants — young adults in their 20s, an almost even split between male and female — had to complete a simple learning task.
As they were doing this, the researchers recorded their brain activity using high-density electroencephalography, form of technology specially designed for behavioral experiments.
The participants engaged in a probabilistic learning task — a simple task that involved extracting information but without requiring high levels of attention.
Following task completion, they filled in a questionnaire assessing how focused they perceived themselves to have been while engaged in the exercise.
The researchers found that participants who had allowed their minds to wander during the task had brain activity indicative of a “sleep-like” state at the time of the experiment. This was also associated with “enhanced probabilistic learning,” especially in the early stages of the task.
All of this is to say that the daydreamers appeared to experience a boost in learning capacity. Moreover, the researchers also found that daydreamers and focused participants were both able to complete the task just as effectively.
Speaking to MNT, Caroline Fenkel, DSW, LCSW, adolescent mental Health expert, and Chief Clinical Officer at Charlie Health, who was not involved in this study, commented that “the findings […] add to a growing body of research that challenges the idea that ‘focus equals learning’.”
“As a clinician, I find it compelling that the brain might be quietly learning in the background while we daydream,” Fenkel added, noting that “this study highlights that the brain is always working, even when it seems like we’ve checked out.”
“And for folks who’ve been told they’re ‘not paying attention enough,’ especially those with ADHD or trauma histories, this can feel validating and hopeful,” she suggested.
The mechanisms behind how mind wandering might help enhance learning capacity under certain circumstances, though, remain unclear.
Simor and Németh were wary of providing a full hypothesis in the absence of hard evidence. “We prefer to remain cautious about causality,” they told us.
Still, they noted that:
“What we observe is the periods of mind wandering are not negatively but, to some extent, positively associated with nonconscious, probabilistic learning, which is a very fundamental form of learning. […] Mind wandering may reflect a state when cognitive resources are allocated to process information at the expense of accurate responses and sustained attention. One possibility is that mind wandering is linked to sleep-like neural activity, which facilitates information processing and memory consolidation. The other possibility is that mind wandering reflects a state when controlled, so called model based processes are attenuated and associative, automatic, model-free learning is increased.”
At the same time, they cautioned that daydreaming is, admittedly, not always helpful, and that we need to be careful about allowing our minds to wander in situations that require our full, dedicated awareness and engagement.
“This [study] finding does not question the widely established observation that mind wandering exerts a negative influence on a variety of cognitive domains, especially those which require effortful attention,” said Simor and Németh.
More work from Simor, Németh, and their collaborators is also on the horizon. “We have a lot of plans for continuing this research — from the perspectives of sleep research, learning and memory, and intervention studies,” Simor and Németh told MNT.
The list of upcoming trials the team is looking forward to is extensive: “On the sleep research side, we’re studying patients with narcolepsy, who are likely to experience more mind wandering during the day. We want to see how this affects their learning and predictive processes. […] We’ve also started an intervention study where we use noninvasive brain stimulation to enhance sleep-like slow-wave activity in the brain. and investigate whether this leads to increased mind wandering and improved implicit learning.”
For now, daydreamers can rest easy in the knowledge that not every distraction is bad news for the brain.
