Daydream Believer

It’s usually considered bad when your mind wanders. But research by Dr Eric Schumacher of Georgia Tech suggests ‘mind-wandering’ means your brain has enough cognitive capacity to multi-task

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What’s the difference between daydreaming and mind-wandering?

Researchers are interested in identifying different types of what are called ‘off-task behaviours’. Mind-wandering is a coherent train of thought – you might be thinking about the fact that you have to pick up your dry cleaning, pick up the kids from school, feed the dog. Whereas daydreaming is not goal-directed – a creative endeavour, thinking about things that don’t exist. We were interested in other abilities that relate to the tendency to mind-wander.

How did you measure mind-wandering?

We gave over 100 participants questions like, ‘On the bus, do you think about what you had for breakfast?’ All of our minds tend to wander sometimes, but there are individual differences. So we measured brain activity at rest: we put participants in an MRI scanner and had them lie there in the dark, staring at a plus sign on a screen, for about 10 minutes. Their minds were probably wandering at that time.

Which brain circuits are involved?