Why We Daydream
While some people seem to be always in a daydream, the truth is that we all do it - even though some of us might like to call it “multi-tasking”. While we perform routine tasks, our minds seem to naturally wander to other thoughts, plans and schedules. Whatever you call it, daydreaming is really a gift of nature, allowing our minds to attend to tasks and still process other thoughts unrelated to the tasks but possibly of importance to us. Now scientists may have identified the region of the brain responsible for our ability to daydream.
A default network of cortical regions, known to be active when the mind is unoccupied has now been seen to be active when a person is engaged in routine activities.
Research at Dartmouth college involved functional MRI and participants who performed routine tasks they had practiced for several days. Malia Mason of Harvard Medical School trained subjects in memory tasks that were repeated for four days. On the fifth day, the subjects performed these tasks while fMRI was performed.
While the subjects were not performing any task, there was activation in several cortical regions, including parts of the medial prefrontal cortex (involved in executive functions), the premotor cortex (which coordinates body movements), and the cingulate (part of the limbic system that is implicated in memory and learning). When the subjects were asked to perform their well-rehearsed tasks, many of these areas were recruited once again, but when the job was slightly altered, the signals from these areas attenuated.
It appears that daydreaming may be the default state of the brain. Daydreaming may serve to keep us interested and aroused when performing mundane tasks and it may be the key to our ability to multi-task.
“In a sense, these thoughts reflect an amazing capacity on our part to multitask,” Mason explains, expanding on the last possibility. “It’s like we have a sense of what we can and what we cannot get away with. In other words, it is as if we have a sense of how much attentional resources we have “left over” and [then we] allocate these resources to working out some problem or anticipating what we have to do in the near future.”
