Slashdot Mirror
Daydreaming Is Really Complex Problem-Solving
beefsprocket writes "ScienceDaily reports that 'A new University of British Columbia study finds that our brains are much more active when we daydream than previously thought. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (abstract), finds that activity in numerous brain regions increases when our minds wander. It also finds that brain areas associated with complex problem-solving — previously thought to go dormant when we daydream — are in fact highly active during these episodes. "Mind wandering is typically associated with negative things like laziness or inattentiveness," says lead author, Prof. Kalina Christoff, UBC Dept. of Psychology. "But this study shows our brains are very active when we daydream — much more active than when we focus on routine tasks."'"
Did you say something?
our ability for imagination is located in that part.
I'd also bet that a large segment of the population lacks this part, too.
Boss: "Stop daydreaming, be productive."
Me: "But I am! By daydreaming I'm even more productive than I would be if I were strictly working on the task assigned to me! Slashdot told me so!"
Boss: "Fantastic, go be productive at another company."
"Mind wandering is typically associated with negative things like laziness..." and "our brains are very active when we daydream"
These aren't mutually exclusive. It just means our brains are very active on other topics
Always felt like I was more alive in a daydream then I was doing grunt work.
I like my mind active or I grow bored. i'm sure much of slashdot is like this. Found that I daydreamed a lot and had a hard time focusing on grunt work
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
So if I am really active while sitting inattentive, basically ignoring my surroundings and seemingly "brain-dead", then surely we can't claim video games are fattening. Right?
No comprende? Let me type that a little slower for you...
I see a bad egg when I look at your niece. She is a twiddler, a dreamer, a silly heart and she is a jabberbox. And, frankly, I don't think she takes a thing in her life or her career as a student seriously.
---She's only six.
That is not a valid excuse! I hear that every day and I dismiss it.
Daydreaming is basically shutting off (or at least ignoring) the bulk of the sensory inputs into your brain, and letting your imagination run the show for a period of time. Is it really surprising that having to create an ongoing reality that replaces a bunch of those ignored sensory inputs requires the brain to do some serious work? Especially when compared to performing a routine task that you've already done hundreds of times?
Laziness isn't really connected in any meaningful way to how hard your brain is working. I could give my brain a pretty serious workout by staying home, sitting on the couch, and doing crossword puzzles until next thursday, but that's still a pretty lazy way to spend a week.
Unfortunately, my boss isn't impressed by general problem solving as much as he's impressed by the solving of the specific problems that he's paying me to figure out.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Please tag "noshitsherlock" ..
that if he wants productivity to soar he has to hire more hot co-workers for me to daydream about.
...annndddd if you guys need me I'll be in my mandatory sensitivity training.
Dreaming up scenarios where my coding skills and knowledge of cutting-edge physics theories gets me women and fame is a really complex thought process. Takes a lot of brain power.
Free the Quark 3 from asymptotic confinement! Bring your charm! Don't get down! All colours and flavours welcome!
Figuring out the sequence of events by which Natalie Portman suddenly acquires an acute allergy to clothes and is driven into my house where we discover that the only cure is hours and hours of passionate woopie and hot grits is a lot more complicated than it sounds!
The enemies of Democracy are
Vindicated at last!
....I'd have solved all the problems of the world by now.
I'm sorry but while I accept that getting your mind off the problem and "zoning out" can be good to get you focused when you do return to work, I do not accept that somehow my subconscious magically solves problems while I dream of warm days and blue seas.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
You have to love the Tetris Effect
I certainly come up with some of my best thoughts when daydreaming. I'm tempted to make a joke about how the only better thinking time is when I'm on the toilet. But I'm worried that I'll get modded as a troll.
and I think that...
hmm
mmm
hmmmm
mmm
oh!
anyway, what did you ask?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I gotta rewrite my evaluation...
End anonymous moderation and posting on
I'm not daydreaming... I'm solving world peace... promise.
it might be just complicated for you but think if ever that scenario realised than how hard it will be for Her. No ?
somethings are best left unsaid , I am one of those things
I wonder how common daydreaming is in introverts vs extroverts and those with a large associative horizon.
I'd imagine having a good imagination and constantly working it can lead to impressive creativity and novel ways of viewing problems... but it could also lead to not accomplishing a lot at all because it is just so enamoring.
So when I made a joke once about a day dream being like when the screensaver kicks on... I was scientifically or technically correct? Stuff is still happening in there, you just cant tell based on whats being displayed?
Talk about sleeping on the job... I didn't even post this in the right story...
Did you say something?
About right..
However, I wonder if the author has looked into writing books for academic purposes...
Anyone who has a degree knows just how much money is made on textbooks, and the frequency with which they are replaced and updated.
If I was a writer looking to make a living at it, especially in a vertical field, I would seriously consider writing university level textbooks.
You never need to daydream now
With instant entertainment available through your iPhone, iPod or cell phone in your pocket.
I wonder what effect lack of daydreams have on kids growing up now?
Bookwormhole.net -- over 11,000 published book reviews.
I spend half my time daydreaming and half my time doodling.
I do great work.
So the more you daydream the more you need to be highly concentrated for something and are thus compensating for your inability to do it "live" ? :P
nothing new here, move along ;-)
Oh will someone please mod this guy up! This is a classic example of 'daydreaming' at work, cuz we've ALL been there. I imagine productivity levels would soar if one was captivated for a few minutes by a lovely set of gazongas walking by.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
... one of the most complex ongoing problems is finding a way to get out of doing work.
Have gnu, will travel.
Every night for the past two weeks, I've fallen asleep (unintentionally) at 3 p.m. on the dot most afternoons. I'm a student so I can get away with it.
During these daytime naps, I'll have a pretty standard dream involving my friends and some familiar locations, but towards the end I find I ALWAYS have to do something involving organizing.
Normally I have to pack a rucksack or a bag, but recently I've arranged office furniture so it can fit in an elevator and other complex problems. The problems have to be solved strategically and sequentially, I have to put things in the right order and often find myself taking everything out and starting again.
I can't help but think in this case that the rucksack or the elevator is a complex metaphor for... well, my brain. Is this what it is?
Need a new mod category; Troll as in inflammatory vs Troll as in troglodyte.
With all the complex problem solving I work on you would've thought that I'd have solved a few more problems by now.
You should have left it alone. I probably would have modded you funny if I had points.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
I thought we covered this in March. I searched like hell for proof, and only when i entered DOODLING did either slashdot or google return pages to calm me down. Searching on "daydreaming" brought back and irritatingly high FUCKLOAD of returns for today, but next to NOTHING valuable about past stories. Even in NPR, their search brought back only their program "Daydreaming". It's annoying as hell to have these "tinfoil" moments when searching in vain is due to poor searching, but in which quick, poor searching on my part would lead me to thing i am losing my mind.
Anyway, what today is newer than in March on this topic?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/susan-smalley/doodling-and-the-wanderin_b_166440.html
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101727048
I knew i'd heard the NPR story, as i was on my way to work. IIRC, Morning Edition ran it multiple times, causing me to remember it, but i failed to recall "doodling".
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I thought that daydreaming, or dreaming in general, was the period where problems that occurred during the day re-manifested themselves...
When I daydream, I usually think of solutions to problems that go on throughout the day.
And this is why I smoke pot. When I run into a wall with some code I'm working on, I smoke a bowl, zone out and shortly later I usually have a way better way to implement things.
It might work out a wee bit better if you give him a copy of PNAS instead of saying "Slashdot told me so."
[...] wee [...] PNAS [...]
PINGAS!
My mind doesn't work in a linear fashion most of the time. Trying to get a line of reasoning from Point A to Point Z in a straight line works sometimes, but not usually. I always have many tangential threads in progress, and they proceed at their own pace. Forcing them rarely results in anything good, while letting them resolve themselves naturally almost always produces a positive result.
That is why I'm typically working on at least three or four simultaneous projects at work. While I'm working on one of them, I'm frequently hit with a seemingly random insight into another one. Then I switch projects to implement that insight. The same thing happens when I zone out and let my mind wander wherever it wants to go.
Daydreaming is also a great way to relieve tunnel-vision and stress. I can't count the number of times I've reached a seemingly dead-end, only to find out that I was over-thinking things. Stepping away from the problem and thinking about random, totally unrelated things frequently eliminates mental blocks and allows me to see problems from different perspectives. It's a great problem-solving tool that gets a bad rap because it's so easily abused.
I have solved some pretty complex network and server issues by simply meditating on them in the shower.... works like a charm, first thing in the morning, fresh from the day before.... Daydreaming and Meditation are pretty close in nature....I'm not surprised @ all by this article....
Gravity!... It's not just a good idea... It's the Law!
Naaah....you should get modded as a troillet....
my brain is decoding messages from outer space!
Yep, I experience this quite frequently. On many occasions I've figured out a solution to a difficult tech problem when in the very light sleep just before waking up (or very shortly after waking up). Normally when this happens, I feel semi-aware that I'm thinking something through yet know that I'm not awake, it's hard to describe. Then finally when I do wake up and everything clicks it's eureka time!
This is a good example of fMRI based brain research reaching an erroneous conclusion due to lack of understanding of what the data represents. The "activation" is increased O2/CO2 transfer, assumed to be increased metabolism due to the cells working harder. That's quite right. However, this is taken to mean those cells are processing information in that region -- that the work known to be done by that region is being done. That's definitely not necessarily true. Within any region there's both excitatory activity (that area is doing its job -- it's turned on) and inhibitory activity (that regions is turned off). The fMRI can't tell the difference, and the researchers fail to even consider that their results show the latter.
Support for this assertion is the statement that part of the brain was supposedly expected to go "dormant" during a certain task or processing procedure. No part of the brain becomes dormant. All neurons have a resting rate of firing. The cells that make up the processing power of the cortex (pyramidal neurons) fire on the order of 10 Hz when they're doing "nothing". That "nothing" represents business as usual while other regions increase or decrease in throughput. There's no such thing as dormant, the only reasonable conclusion being that we don't know what is being done.
They conclude that since a region lights up, that means it's actively processing its preferred task. Specifically they say that the executive network -- complex problem solving -- is operating. During the period of signal acquisition, the waiting just prior to the button press, the subject is waiting for the cue. They are focusing attention on the target. In such as state of preparation high level processing is inhibited (supported by a large body of physiological research going back to Pavlov), not as they conclude, recruited. But by working from their erroneous assumption that what lights up works hard, they miss the fact that their results show exactly what everyone else always has, that the region is being actively inhibited, and shows it by lighting up on their fMRI.
In fact most of the lighting up seen on fMRI is probably such inhibitory activity. Most of the brain is spontaneously active, probably processing things in case they're needed. When such things are needed -- when that region is recruited -- it doesn't necessarily increase or decrease in activity. Rather the firing of the cells within the networks recruited synchronize their firing. Overall the firing rate, and therfore neural metabolism, the basis of fMRI signal, doesn't change much, if at all. The inhibitory activity comes and goes to actively synchronize or desynchronize regions being recruited or inhibited.
I've done both EEG and fMRI work with very similar designs, and with other physiological measures done in parallel. I've seen pretty much what they show. However, we started from the well supported position that the brain is always working, but works harder to both produce results and inhibit results. Failure of the latter results in cognitive overload and confusing of not contradictory results, in the "bottleneck" processing model, and was intended to examine effortful (top down, executive controlled) disattention (inhibiting of processing within a region or else inhibiting of results from that region). In our model, "off" is go and "on" is either more go or less go. This was the conclusion fMRI, and its result processing, statistical probability mapping, was intended for. TFA comes from the 'christmas tree lights' viewpoint, based on the technology (the map) rather than the brain (the terrain), that "on" is go and "off" is stop. This assumption is at odds with both the actual meaning of the measurement as well as a century of physiology and neural processing.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Using the word "woopie" + 4 digit id = ~75 years old. Am I correct?