What is daydreaming, and is daydreaming good for you?

Daydream. A welcome escape from those inevitable moments of boredom, but you've usually been asked to kick it up once or twice. But now, maybe you can finally relax and let your mind wander a little. These spontaneous trips into our subconscious can be of great benefit to us, improving our ability to perceive, researchers have found.

The study, led by neuroscientist Professor Moshe Bar, aims to explore whether general external stimuli can be used to induce episodes of daydreaming.

To do this, transcranial direct current stimulation, a non-invasive, low-electricity procedure, was used to target the frontal lobes of the brain, an area previously associated with mind wandering. At the same time, participants were asked to track and respond to numbers on a computer screen.

Certainly, the extent to which participants experienced random thoughts unrelated to the task in hand increased significantly in response to treatment.

In itself this is an interesting discovery. However, during the experiment, Barr's team revealed something even more unexpected - that the divergence in these subconscious thoughts actually boosted the subjects' cognitive ability, boosting their performance on the tests.

Bar believes that this phenomenon may result from the combination of "free-thinking" activities and "thought-control" mechanisms within this frontal area of ​​the brain.

“Over the past XNUMX or XNUMX years, scientists have shown that, in contrast to localized neural activity associated with specific tasks, mental wandering involves the activation of a huge virtual network that involves many parts of the brain,” Barr says.

“This engagement across the brain may be involved in behavioral outcomes such as creativity and mood, and may also contribute to the ability to continue the task successfully while the mind sets off on a welcoming mental way.”

Something to think about the next time you're staring out of a window...