An Idling Mind Doesn’t Go to Waste
Brent Tantillo • October 23, 2009 • Uncategorized
According to Wired Magazine, a 2007 study from Michael Kane of the University of North Carolina found that our minds drift away from daily tasks fully one-third of the time. Now perhaps this doesn’t thrill your boss, but it should, and here’s why: daydreaming is crucial to solving problems. As Wired explains:
Daydreaming isn’t just the mind’s way of processing information, though. Other scans have found that the wandering mind also utilizes the prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain that’s involved in problem-solving. The upshot, says Jonathan Schooler, a professor of psychology at UC Santa Barbara who is studying this area, is that your idling mind is likely doing deeply creative work, tackling your hairiest long-term tasks — projects you’ve been trying to address for months, the arc of your career, the state of your marriage.
“Mind-wandering is actually a very involved task,” Schooler says. “You leave the here and now and focus on more remote concerns that nevertheless might be more important. We’ve been focusing on the downside of this, but we need to think about the upside.”
Indeed, Schooler suspects that research like his explains why so many “aha” moments occur when we’re drifting — like Archimedes in the tub.
Brain-scanning technology has uncovered some clues. It turns out that when your mind drifts, your temporal lobes — which are associated with processing long-term memories — become busier. So when you float off into a reverie, you’re actually doing important data-storage work.
So the next time your boss discourages you from reading blogs at work, like this one, just tell him or her, you are working on increasing the firm’s productivity. And perhaps with a bit more daydreaming, there would be fewer people who hate their jobs.
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