Sorry for the radio silence - I've been out and about doing some reporting. But I've got a story in the Sunday Boston Globe on the benefits of daydreaming and the default network:
Teresa Belton, a research associate at East Anglia University in England, first got interested in daydreaming while reading a collection of stories written by children in elementary school. Although Belton encouraged the students to write about whatever they wanted, she was startled by just how uninspired most of the stories were."The tales tended to be very tedious and unimaginative," Belton says, "as if the children were stuck with this very restricted way of thinking. Even when they were encouraged to think creatively, they didn't really know how."
After monitoring the daily schedule of the children for several months, Belton came to the conclusion that their lack of imagination was, at least in part, caused by the absence of "empty time," or periods without any activity or sensory stimulation. She noticed that as soon as these children got even a little bit bored, they simply turned on the television: the moving images kept their minds occupied. "It was a very automatic reaction," she says. "Television was what they did when they didn't know what else to do."
The problem with this habit, Belton says, is that it kept the kids from daydreaming. Because the children were rarely bored - at least, when a television was nearby - they never learned how to use their own imagination as a form of entertainment. "The capacity to daydream enables a person to fill empty time with an enjoyable activity that can be carried on anywhere," Belton says. "But that's a skill that requires real practice. Too many kids never get the practice."
Here is a recent Science paper on the default network. I hope everyone has a lovely Labor Day.
Brain & Behavior
Comments (4)
Welcome back and cheerful Labor Day to you, Jonah! Thanks for another great article. Meditation, of course, is a formal way to cultivate this ability to recognize when you are daydreaming and make space for it. Thoughts and multiple interconnected thoughts = daydreams are ongoing. One simply trains to notice, label, and drop them in order to go back to the object of meditation. This way seem anti-thought but getting rid of thoughts is rarely possible plus you'd be throwing out right hemisphere 'insights' along with left hemisphere 'how am I doing?' type thoughts. Rather you are training to slow thoughts down, develope awareness of your state of mind whatever it is, make friends with your mind, and have insights.
Slightly off topic, I've been wondering about the types of insight tests that are given by Mark Jung-Beeman as described in your New Yorker article. It seems to me that the 'jumble' word puzzles that appear in most daily papers are puzzles that can be solved by insight(rh) or by rote trial and error(lh).
Off to putter in the garden on this beautiful day and maybe have some daydreams!
Posted by: jb | September 1, 2008 5:32 PM