There’s been a lot of attention paid to paying attention lately – and how we really need to not do that all the time. Wall Street Journal, Discover magazine and PhysOrg all have similar reports on daydreaming, actual dreaming and generally unfocused thoughts… and their importance in getting the big ideas.
Taken together, these paint an interesting picture of WHO’S REALLY IN CHARGE in here. Who does the real thinking inside this head I like to think of as mine. Is it me? I can’t really say….
Discover, on attention
The human brain is arguably the most complex organ in the natural world. And yet studies on mind wandering are showing that we find it difficult to stay focused for more than a few minutes on even the easiest tasks, despite the fact that we make mistakes whenever we drift away.…
The fact that both of these important brain networks become active together suggests that mind wandering is not useless mental static. Instead, Schooler proposes, mind wandering allows us to work through some important thinking. Our brains process information to reach goals, but some of those goals are immediate while others are distant. Somehow we have evolved a way to switch between handling the here and now and contemplating long-term objectives. It may be no coincidence that most of the thoughts that people have during mind wandering have to do with the future.
Even more telling is the discovery that zoning out may be the most fruitful type of mind wandering. In their fMRI study, Schooler and his colleagues found that the default network and executive control systems are even more active during zoning out than they are during the less extreme mind wandering with awareness. When we are no longer even aware that our minds are wandering, we may be able to think most deeply about the big picture.
Because a fair amount of mind wandering happens without our ever noticing, the solutions it lets us reach may come as a surprise.
PhysOrg, on dreaming:
“We found that – for creative problems that you’ve already been working on – the passage of time is enough to find solutions,” said [Sara Mednick, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry at UC San Diego and the VA San Diego Healthcare System]. “However, for new problems, only REM sleep enhances creativity.”
Mednick added that it appears REM sleep helps achieve such solutions by stimulating associative networks, allowing the brain to make new and useful associations between unrelated ideas.
Wall Street Journal, on the wandering mind
“People assumed that when your mind wandered it was empty,” says cognitive neuroscientist Kalina Christoff at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, who reported the findings last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. As measured by brain activity, however, “mind wandering is a much more active state than we ever imagined, much more active than during reasoning with a complex problem.”
She suspects that the flypaper of an unfocused mind may trap new ideas and unexpected associations more effectively than methodical reasoning. That may create the mental framework for new ideas. “You can see regions of these networks becoming active just prior to people arriving at an insight,” she says.
…
By monitoring their brain waves, he saw a pattern of high frequency neural activity in the right frontal cortex that identified in advance who would solve a puzzle through insight and who would not. It appeared up to eight seconds before the answer to a problem dawned on the test subject, Dr. Bhattacharya reported in the current edition of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.
“It’s unsettling,” says Dr. Bhattacharya. “The brain knows but we don’t.”