Smallwood, J., &
Schooler, J. W. (2015). The science of mind wandering: empirically navigating the
stream of consciousness. Annual review
of psychology, 66,
487-518.
We spend 25% to 50% of our waking
hours engaged in thoughts that are not related to the here and now, or to the
task we are doing at the moment. Why does
day dreaming occur? What is its
meaning? What does it enable?
When we daydream, or when our mind wanders,
our attention is driven away from the present stream of thought (and usually
also from an external task) towards mental contents that are produced internally
and not by the environment. Often,
thoughts that occur while our mind wanders are not related to external stimuli surrounding us at that moment.
It's possible to research daydreaming using
four methods:
Probe-caught method – every now and then,
randomly, the participant is asked about the content of his experience or about
the thoughts he or she is currently thinking.
Self-caught method – the participant reports when
he "catches" himself daydreaming.
Combining questioning and self reports enables us to estimate people's awareness
of their thoughts.
Retrospective method – data are gathered at the end of a task via
questionnaires, preserving the natural time course of the task.
By an open method – at the
end of a task, the participant is asked o describe what she experienced during
the task performance.
Through the open method, it was discovered
that 48% of thoughts arising during daydreaming deal with the future, 29% deal
with the present, 12% deal with the past and 11% cannot be located in time. Studies show that dysphoria is related with
more daydreaming about the past. Daydreaming about the future tends to improve mood.
A study about people's ability to notice
daydreams about an ex romantic partner of which they are trying not to think
revealed that people were
"caught" (through the Self-caught method)
daydreaming time and again about the ex partner, before they noticed it
themselves. The wish to be with that
partner again was related to a higher chance of daydreaming about him and to a
lower chance to be aware of it.
While performing different tasks, we turn
our attention to the relevant stimuli and sensory modality and give them
preference over stimuli and sensory modalities that are less relevant. It is assumed, that when we daydream, we
inhibit the processing of external perceptual information not related to the stream
of thought that gets preference at that moment.
It's possible, that this inhibition results from the limited attentional
resources that can't be turned inwards and outwards at the same time.
People with good executive control can limit the amount of mind wandering that is not related to the task when the task's demands are
high. There is a negative correlation between
the frequency of mind wandering and executive control ability during
working memory tasks, sustained attention tasks and reading tasks. People with good cognitive control tend to
let their thoughts wander when they perform tasks that don't require a lot of
attentional resources. When task demands
are low, executive control turns the freed attentional resoures to
daydreaming. This means that expertise
in executive control is manifested in an ability to change the allocation of
attentional resources to internal sources (daydreaming) or to external sources,
in line with environmental demands.
People's tendency to daydream during tasks of working memory and intelligence
tests predict their SAT
scores. The more they tend to daydream when performing these tasks the
lower is their SAT score. The ability to
avoid daydreaming while performing a task that requires attentional resources
is an important component of general intellectual ability.
Daydreaming negatively impacts different
cognitive functions, among them reading
comprehension, and increases the risk of car accidents. Training in mindfulness significantly
decreases daydreaming while reading and performing working memory tasks, and
helps improve performance in these tasks (mindfulness : a
mental state entailing a
primary focus on the
circumstances of the
present).
Training in monitoring our thoughts can
help reduce daydreaming in inappropriate times.
Researchers think that mindfulness helps because it encourages people to
pay attention to their thought contents, that is, to monitor their
thoughts. Taking memory tests during a lecture also reduces daydreaming
and improves student's ability to remember the lecture's contents.
Daydreaming is related to creativity. Writers were asked to write down creative
ideas they've had during the day every evening for a fortnight, and to note the situation in which they occurred. More than 40% of the creative ideas occurred
when they were engaged in activities not related to work, or thought about
something unrelated to the subject they were working on. In another study, a relation was found
between people's tendency to daydream and their performance on a test of Ideational
Fluency (finding
as many uses to a specific object as possible – a test measuring creativity and
belonging to long term
storage and retrieval ability).
It's possible that daydreaming provides mental breaks in
task performance that enables us to rest during difficult task performance or
to deal with boring tasks. People daydream more during routine and uncomplicated
tasks. For example, pilots
were especially likely to report mind wandering when engaging in flight
segments that were going smoothly relative to segments in which they were
having some difficulty. When pilots took the role of copilot, mind wandering
occurred nearly as twice as often as when they were in the role of the pilot..
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