Harnessing the Magic of Daydreaming
Ever catch yourself daydreaming or your mind wandering off when you’re supposed to be focusing on something else? Well, there’s a psychologist named Jonathan Smallwood from Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, who was really intrigued by why our minds do this. About 25 years ago, he started looking into this when not many people thought it was a big deal. He was curious and wanted to find out more, so he set up experiments where people had to do dull tasks on computers to see how their minds would wander.
Through careful watching and analysis, Smallwood found out some pretty interesting things about daydreaming. One big discovery was how much our feelings affect what we daydream about. Depending on whether we’re feeling down or happy, our daydreams can take us back to the past or into the future. This shows that daydreaming isn’t just a way to escape boredom, since it’s actually connected to how we handle our emotions and prepare for things that might happen later.
A key part of Smallwood’s research was finding a special pattern of brain activity that happens when we daydream. Unlike what people used to think — that daydreaming only happens when we’re not doing anything — his research showed that our brains are actually busy organizing our…