Daydreamers get a bad rap. From the distracted school kid to the faraway office worker, those who tend to let their thoughts drift during the day are often branded as lazy, slow, or - at the worst of times - stupid.
Even so, all of us do it sometimes. Maybe you're getting towards the end of a long workday, and get a bit lost in your thoughts while staring out the window; or perhaps you're stuck on a long train journey, and find yourself imaging what your life would be like if you were married to the cute person sitting in the adjacent seat.
If you do, it's nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, as new research has shown, people who daydream frequently might even be smarter than those who tend to be more grounded.
In a small study of just over 100 people, researchers at Georgia Tech measured people's cognitive ability and monitored their brain patterns on an MRI machine. The subjects of the experiment were asked to concentrate on a specific item for five minutes while their brain activity was observed, during which time the scientists looked for instances of separate areas of the brain working together.
“The correlated brain regions gave us insight about which areas of the brain work together during an awake, resting state,” explains Christine Godwin, a pyschology PhD student and co-author of the study.
In another part of the test, participants were asked to self-report on how often their minds wandered on a daily basis. When compared with the results of the MRI, those who daydreamed more frequently were shown to have greater intellectual and creative aptitude.
Even more surprisingly, volunteers who reported having wandering minds also had more efficient brains in general.
As Eric Schumacher, co-author of the paper and psychology professor, explains:
“People tend to think of mind wandering as something that is bad. You try to pay attention and you can’t. Our data are consistent with the idea that this isn’t always true. Some people have more efficient brains.”
He goes on to say:
“Our findings remind me of the absent-minded professor— someone who’s brilliant, but off in his or her own world, sometimes oblivious to their own surroundings, or school children who are too intellectually advanced for their classes. While it may take five minutes for their friends to learn something new, they figure it out in a minute, then check out and start daydreaming.”
In layman's terms, brains that work more efficiently are also better adept at processing more thoughts, meaning that they have a tendency to wander during less-engaging or routine tasks. People who have more efficient brains should be more capable of stopping and restarting a task without missing a beat; for instance, drifting seamlessly in and out of a conversation, or cooking a meal while mentally planning what you're going to do tomorrow.
However, being a daydreamer is not a strong enough factor on its own to guarantee a higher brain efficiency.
“There are important individual differences to consider as well, such as a person’s motivation or intent to stay focused on a particular task,” says Godwin, showing that more distracted people aren't necessarily smarter by default, but also that intelligent people aren't always those prone to daydreaming.
That being said, if you are someone who finds themselves often drifting off into their own thoughts, don't consider it a negative thing - it could be the key to increased creativity and mental agility.
