for the mind

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Brain Health Tip

Daydream Your Way to Eureka!

Stop feeling guilty about daydreaming! According to a new study that scanned daydreaming brains, our minds appear to be most active when wandering. This accounts for moments of insight - those instances of coming up with solutions when we're not necessarily looking for them, which differs from analytical problem solving.

When we allow our brains to set their own courses, they activate several areas of problem solving at once - areas which don't usually work in unison and which alight on insightful solutions long before they become conscious.

"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. But, in looking at EEG recordings, "mind wandering is a much more active state than we ever imagined, much more active than during reasoning with a complex problem."

So go ahead. Space out.