Thought-free times speak for creativity and high cognitive capacity

Wandering thoughts: Those who often get caught up in daydreaming need not be concerned - on the contrary. For the thought-lingering digression can be a sign of high intelligence and creativity, as a study reveals. Researchers found in this a close connection between the frequent day dreaming and a particularly good networking of the brain. In the tests of cognitive performance and creativity the daydreamers moreover perform particularly well.

Thought-free daydreaming can be a sign that the brain has a lot of free capacity. © agsandrew / thinkstock

Whether in a moderately exciting meeting, at school or on the road to work: Often we catch ourselves with our thoughts that we are quite somewhere else instead in the here and now. For a long time this daydreaming was a sign of lack of concentration and attention. Above all, parents are sometimes worried when their children are often daydreaming like lost in their thoughts.

Stronger connected brain areas

But as Christine Godwin from the Georgia Institute of Technology and her colleagues have now found out, daydreaming is by no means negative - rather the contrary. For their study, they had asked 100 subjects about how often their thoughts were digressing in everyday life. They were then given the task of fixing a point for five minutes, while their brain activity was recorded by means of Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI).

Brain activity in this task gives us an idea of ​​what brain areas work together during the awake, relaxed state, explains Godwin.

In the course of the day, participants were informed about frequent daytime dreams. The Default Mode Network (DMN), which is important for the attention, was particularly closely linked to the Frontoparietal Control Network, the area that controls our mental focus.

More intelligent and creative?

Interestingly, there is evidence that this pattern of linking also plays a role for different cognitive abilities, says Godwin.

For this reason, the researchers then subjected the participants to several standardized tests of the so-called fluid intelligence - problem-solving, logical thinking - and creativity.

The surprising result: The subjects, who tended to frequent daydreams, performed better in these tests than their supposedly more concentrated fellows.

We have identified significant positive correlations between daydreaming and fluid intelligence, as well as creativity, Godwin and her colleagues report.

More efficient brain more likely to digress

People tend to see daydreaming as a bad thing, but our data show that this does not have to be the case, says Godwins colleague Eric Schumacher.

Instead, the daydreamers' brains seem to be particularly efficient: they can be idle because their brains have enough free capacity.

This is reminiscent of an absent-minded professor - someone who is brilliant but often seems to be sunk into his own world, says Schumacher. Or to particularly talented school children: While their schoolmates need five minutes to learn something new, they have understood it after a minute and then start to daydream.

Godwin and Schumacher want to further explore the phenomenon of daydreaming in order to find out when the digression of thoughts can be helpful and when it may have a negative impact.

It seems clear that certain cases of daydreaming can be a very positive sign, the researchers said.

Source: Neuropsychologia, 2017; doi: 10.1016