What a day for a daydream (13th January 2011)
There is good news for we day dreamers.
Research has emerged which shows that doing nothing but day dreaming improves focus and makes us smarter.
Jonah Lehrer is the author of “Proust was a neuroscientist” and “How we decide”.
On his blog site http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2010/01/intelligence_and_the_idle_mind.php he makes reference to a study conducted by Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli and John Gabrieli of MIT which suggests that an active idle state of mind activates long-range neural connections in the brain that are linked with high performance in IQ tests and better thought processes and intelligence.
Lehrer explains
“In the latest edition of Mind Matters, Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli and John Gabrieli of MIT outline some interesting new research on the link between resting state activity – the performance of the brain when it’s lying still in a brain scanner, doing nothing but daydreaming – and general intelligence. It turns out that cultivating an active idle mind, or teaching yourself how to daydream effectively, might actually encourage the sort of long-range neural connections that make us smart. At the very least, it’s time we stop discouraging kids from staring out the classroom window, because mind wandering isn’t a waste of time.”
As W.B Yeats so perceptively wrote:
“”Tread Softly because you tread on my dreams”.