New research shows some types of optimistic daydreaming are productive, improve IQ and inspire resolve, writes Ainslie MacGibbon.
The young Albert Einstein was more likely to have been the child staring out of the window in class than the one bent over his books. Einstein, like many great scientists, thinkers and intellectuals, was also a documented daydreamer in the classroom. But what if he had gone to school today?
Today, children's days tend to be highly structured and daydreaming in school is seen as time wasting and indicative of poor self-control.
Although this approach is enabling many students to focus, there are fears we may also be dulling creativity - even greatness - in the process. There is mounting research that shows the idle, ''resting'' mind is doing everything but resting, perhaps even making us smarter.
Dr Jerome Singer, an emeritus professor of Psychology at Yale University, pioneered research into daydreaming during the 1960s. He says younger children verbalise all their thoughts but by the time they reach school, they are conditioned to keep some thoughts to themselves, and so they enter a private world of daydreaming.
Dr Singer says his research shows that daydreaming can have many constructive uses, including self-regulation and helping children to plan ahead. He says while daydreaming in children might reflect the fact that a child is not comprehending material and is seeking distraction, ''we have also found that many children who are creative and imaginative may find that they can avoid some of the boring or repetition of ordinary classroom work by drifting into playful fantasies without missing the material being presented''.
''Teachers should be sensitive to individual differences and accept the fact that some children may indeed be capable of a form of multitasking, " he says.
The first Australian-born woman to win a Nobel prize, the molecular biologist Elizabeth Blackburn, was also a daydreamer. She told an audience of children earlier this year at Canberra's National Science and Technology centre, Questacon, that daydreaming had contributed to her success. "I think you need time to daydream, to let your imagination take you where it can. Just do that some of the time, because I've noticed [that] among the creative, successful scientists who've really advanced things, that was a part of their life," she said.
Dr Singer believes that "daydreaming is important because it is a critical way in which human beings move beyond their immediate environment to create vicarious virtual realities that allow them to try out alternative personalities and interests."
Research shows we spend between 15 and 50 per cent of our day daydreaming. Dr Marcus Raichle, a neurologist at Washington University in St Louis School of Medicine, discovered a network in the brain that is now known as the default network (the brain's default position when there is no outside stimulus). Dr Raichle's research shows several structures become unusually active in the brain when it is thought to be resting or idle, and he concludes that daydreaming is the mind's default mode. It has since been established that this network is weakened in people with autism or Alzheimer's.
In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the US last year, Dr Jonathan Schooler, a professor of psychology at the University of California, found "neural recruitment in both default [resting] and executive network [goal-directed] regions was strongest when subjects were unaware of their own mind wandering."
''The observed parallel recruitment of executive and default network regions - two brain systems that so far have been assumed to work in opposition - suggests that mind wandering may evoke a unique mental state that may allow otherwise opposing networks to work in co-operation." So it is in these periods of daydreaming or "zoning out" when we are unaware that we have drifted off that some real problem-solving takes place.
In Scientific American earlier this year, Dr Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli and Dr John Gabrieli, investigators at The Gabrieli Lab (Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience) at MIT, cited research on the link between the performance of the brain when it is resting, monitored in a brain scanner, and intelligence.
The article says: "For the first time, functional measures of the resting brain are providing new insights into network properties of the brain that are associated with IQ scores. In essence, they suggest that in smart people, distant areas of the brain communicate with each other more robustly than in less smart people."
Dr Andrew Martin, an educational psychologist and professor at the University of Sydney, says letting your mind wander in optimistic ways, but a little more grounded in your future, can lead to good outcomes. ''It directs a child's thoughts and behaviours to relevant activities needed to realise that daydream; it energises and inspires children; and it can enhance persistence towards a goal, especially when the chips are down.''
Source: Sydney Morning Herald www.smh.com.au
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