Whenever I find myself lost in a daydream, I think back to the punishment of sitting in class with a white chalk dot on the end of my nose.
I was in my first year of high school when my Hindi teacher asked me a question, jolting me out of a daydream. All I could do was stare at him blankly - I didn’t even know what he had asked.
When I failed to answer, the teacher launched into a long lecture on the evils of daydreaming.
“An empty mind is the devil’s workshop,” he said.
He called me in front of the class and rubbed his chalk on the blackboard to make a dot, precisely at the level of my nose. He then ordered me to rub my nose hard on the dot - a humiliating punishment.
The fact is, though, all of us daydream. It’s not an activity we should be punishing; instead, we should be recognising its learning potential.
Why do we daydream?
Experts estimate that we daydream for at least one-third of our waking hours, although a single daydream may last only a few seconds.
We spend so much time daydreaming because the human brain is designed for it; it is our minds’ default mode of thought. Brain scans show that our brains have a “default network”: interconnected brain regions that remain active when we daydream or let our minds wander.
This default network functions more vigorously when the brain has no specific task to focus on. When we have a pressing task, the brain focuses on that task and the default network is relatively suppressed.
But our minds do not go blank during familiar tasks, such as making a sandwich, when there is no external demand for thought. Instead, they tend to wander, moving swiftly from one thought to the next.
Most of the time, the wandering ideas are not fanciful; it is us working out everyday problems or making plans for the near future.
Consider what happens when you try remembering a telephone number or email address while looking for your mobile phone to key the number into your contacts list. You are using your working memory, a mental workspace, which allows us to hold in mind and mentally manipulate information over short periods of time.
Working memory capacity has been correlated with general measures of intelligence, such as reading comprehension and IQ scores. But research studies also show that working memory enables the maintenance of mind-wandering. People with high working memory tend to daydream more. Daydreaming is therefore an indication of underlying priorities being held in the working memory.
“But it doesn’t mean that people with high working memory capacity are doomed to a straying mind,” assures Daniel Levinson of the Centre for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The bottom line is that working memory is a resource, and it’s all about how you use it. If your priority is to keep attention on a task, you can use working memory to do that, too.”
Daydreaming in the classroom
So, how does all of this apply to the classroom?
Children are natural and prolific daydreamers; they can dream as well as focus on a task. And yet how often have you broken a child’s reverie and told them to pay attention?
There is extensive evidence that daydreaming is not a waste of time. It helps children make meaning out of the experiences and information they encounter. It encourages creativity, improves memory function and supports problem solving.
In fact, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, a professor of education, psychology and neuroscience at the University of Southern California, suggests that we should be explicitly teaching children about the value of daydreaming, as well as other more diffuse mental activities, such as remembering and reflecting, and building opportunities into lessons for them to engage in these modes of thought.
“Teachers should aim to engage their students in deep, complex conversations about rich, relevant and interesting ideas, no matter the content area they are teaching,” she says. “Often, when kids daydream in class, it is because the structure of the class is overly didactic - teachers are supposed to tell, and students are supposed to passively listen and later recall. But this is not how knowledge and skills are actually built in the brain and mind.”
Intense focus on a problem has advantages, but relaxed thinking leads children to contemplate ideas that sometimes seem silly or far-fetched. Such imaginative thoughts might not be practical, but they often are the perfect springboard to creative insights.
Neuroscience now supports the idea that daydreaming increases the coupling of two disparate brain regions, the default network, which is active during daydreaming, and the cognitive control network, which is involved in executive functions such as planning and problem solving.
Eric Schumacher, professor of psychology at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US, and his colleagues studied the brain patterns of 129 volunteers while they lay in an MRI machine. The participants also completed a questionnaire about how much their minds wandered during the day. A study of these two data sets showed that the brain’s default and cognitive control networks work in unison when our minds are resting.
The study, published in the journal Neuropsychologia, also revealed that those who reported more frequent daydreaming scored higher on tests to measure intellectual creativity.
The negative side of daydreaming
This is not to say that daydreaming is always positive. There is evidence that some people experience what psychologists call “maladaptive dreaming”.
Writing in the Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy, Eli Somer, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Haifa in Israel, describes maladaptive daydreaming as an extensive fantasy activity that interferes with our ability to cope with everyday life.
“The waste of time spent in fantasy, and the gap between the idealised imaginary life and the more dreary reality, can result in feelings of shame, depression and attention deficit,” he says.
Nirit Soffer-Dudek, a psychologist at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, who also studies maladaptive dreaming, believes that people who experience it often have other underlying psychological conditions, including anxiety, depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder. She also suggests that maladaptive daydreaming is linked to ADHD. Somer, Soffer-Dudek and their colleagues report in the Journal of Clinical Psychology that around a fifth of 83 respondents in their study with ADHD showed signs of maladaptive daydreaming.
Research on maladaptive daydreaming in children is limited, but it is likely triggered by loneliness and boredom. Creative daydreaming, in which most children engage, is not maladaptive.
Of course, there is also a time and a place for mind-wandering, and that time might not be in the middle of your explanation of a key element of your lesson.
But the overall message to teachers is clear: daydreaming isn’t bad. It’s just another side of imagining.
So, please think before you snap children out of their daydreams, and where you can, make time in the school day for pupils to let their minds wander.
Surendra Verma is a science writer and author based in Melbourne, Australia
