Why Your Wandering Mind Is Actually a Sign of a Sharp Brain

Latest Lifestyle News: Day-dreaming, years and years, has been considered an earmark of the unfocused. Whether it is a student staring out of a classroom window or an employee drifting off because of a lengthy meeting, the phenomenon of zoning out is often followed by a sense of guilt. Neurobiological studies are, however, starting to change this story.

According to new findings of Harvard Medical School, these periods of silent wakefulness are not just fruitless periods of inactivity. Instead, there are periods when the brain restructures itself, enhances its memory, and gets ready to face the next challenges. Day-dreaming is by far not a waste of time,e as it can be explained as one of the best ways through which the brain learns.

The Science of “Quiet Wakefulness”

This research was carried out in the journal Natures and it revolved around what researchers call quiet wakefulness. It is a condition where the person is awake, though not involved in some external activity. To examine the process that takes place during such moments, researchers at Harvard’s neuroscience department were able to monitor the activity in the mice’s brains when they were presented with a certain visual pattern.

The brains of the mice were never in a dormant state when they were resting after facing such pictures. Rather, researchers found reactivations, which are brief bursts of neural activity that recreated the patterns that formed when the mice were viewing the images. In effect, the mice were day-dreaming on what they had just witnessed.

What was important about this discovery is that these internal replays were not echoes of the past. The brain activity of these daydreams was, in fact, a forecast of the way the brain would react to the same pictures subsequently. This may imply that day-dreaming is an initiative process, and it helps the brain to practice and perfect its grasp of the world.

Boosting Brain Plasticity

The very idea of neuroplasticity, or the ability of the brain to change and adapt to new experiences, is central to this research. The Harvard students, headed by PhD student Nghia Nguyen, discovered that daydreaming assists the brain in distinguishing between incongruent bits of information.

The act of accessing memories in silent moments causes the brain to avoid neural patterns in place of each other. This way of doing things helps the mind to identify the difference between two similar experiences or images. This, in the long run, improves the efficiency of the brain.

According to Mark Andermann, a professor of medicine at Harvard and senior author of the study, it is certain that when one never takes any daytime rest, there will be a reduction in such events of daydreaming, which are crucial in neuron plasticity.

More Than Just a Distraction

Although the study carried out by Harvard researchers focused on visual patterns, other studies confirm these results in terms of creativity and problem-solving. The wandering mind triggers a network of the brain that is referred to as the default mode network. This network deals with the inner thinking, the vision of the future, and the memories.

More often than not, the thinking will be linear and inflexible when one is highly concentrated on an activity. Constraints are lost when one daydreams. This allows the brain to create new associations of unrelated ideas. It is at such instances of distraction as one takes a shower, walks, or gazes at a wall that one may get a solution to a complex problem.

Besides, these brain mini-naps are used to avoid mental exhaustion. The same way that the body needs to rest after exercise, the brain needs to have some days of low-intensity exercise to store new knowledge acquired during the day.

How to Daydream Productively

To exploit the strength of the natural inclinations of the brain, professionals suggest:

Rather than picking up the phone every five minutes in between, when taking a break, sit and be quiet. Give the brain time to digest new things.
Walking, knitting, gardening, and other activities of the same kind are best suited to day-dreaming, since you need some degree of attention to keep you busy without consuming thought.
In case attention is lost in a long task, do not fight it at that moment. It is even possible that a momentary mental diversion is exactly what the brain should have to get back to the project with a new point of view.

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