Everybody knows the kid in the back-corner of the classroom daydreaming out into the playground or at the clouds. The teacher knows this student is not paying attention, their mind is on a distant land, and he’s not getting any information from the lesson. While the kid certainly is not obtaining anything that is coming from the teacher, perhaps this mind-wondering has other cognitive benefits that might help him for the future.
It has been long known that mind wondering activates the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), a recently evolved brain region that is only found in mammals. This finding is surprising to many because it is also a brain region that has been associated with creative problem solving, working memory, and decision making — very cognitively demanding behaviors, unlike mind-wandering. Also known in the brain research world is the finding that it is common for the mind to be wandering during tasks. In fact, we spend about half our time during tasks mind-wandering.
A recent study by Vadim Axelrod and colleagues found that when given a repetitive task, participants minds are wondering a whole lot. They did this through asking the participants what they were thinking about throughout the task. But that is already known; what is important from this study is that the more the participants’ minds were wondering, the better they did at the task! In addition, the researchers used transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), in which an electrode is attached to the scalp that sends electrical currents activating the neurons in that particular brain region. Here, the researchers used tDCS on the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and found that it increased mind-wandering!
So how did this happen? How does mind-wandering actually increase our ability to do repetitive tasks? Some suggest that when doing a repetitive task you have a propensity to want to stop, called “temporal discounting”, and this temporal discounting is inhibited by the mind’s ability to daydream or wonder. So mind-wondering stops the mechanism by which we want to stop doing a repetitive task therefore making us do better at the task… hmm.
In addition, mind-wandering benefits us in ways that aren’t directly tied to task ability. Mind-wandering also increases creative problem solving and allows us to “run future-oriented simulations.” Not only is mind-wandering beneficial for thinking about possible outcomes to situations but its also beneficial for how we would feel given that possible future outcome, increasing our future planning abilities.
What do you think? Is the kid in the back-corner of the class increasing his abilities to plan for the future, solve creative problems and complete repetitive tasks?
Eli
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