"daydream believer, and a..."
Jan. 19th, 2007 11:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
LiveScience.com - Daydreamers: Scientists Find Our Bored Baseline:
Bored out of your skull is a reality. A new study of mind wandering shows that the mundane moments of life allow brains to shift into a default resting state that invites daydreaming.Now, granted, there's been no attempt here to link this "daydream" to ADD, but I think the potential is there. I personally think that most ADD diagnoses these days is simply either an extreme case of this "lack of challenge" or a defensive reaction when the challenge is (subconsciously) interpreted as too much. Yeah, there's REAL ADD, where hitting those irrelevant thoughts really is out of control, but the sooner we weed out the real from the "looks like it but isn't", the better for BOTH types of afflictees.
Some psychologists had suggested that mind wandering could be the brain’s baseline, a place of flitting thoughts from which a person must wrench away for challenging work.
The new study agrees and looks deeply into the neural mechanics behind this common and sometimes happy affliction.
The findings also offer a solution to those who need to snap to. Rather than muscle-fatiguing efforts to focus, just try switching to more engaging work, said neuroscientist Malia Mason, lead author of the new work.
[...]
Daydream degree
Not all minds wander to the same extent. Individuals who showed more blood flow in the default brain regions also reported more stray thoughts.
Now the scientists want to know why these unfocused thoughts occur at all. One idea is that daydreaming allows a person to stay only as alert as they need be during mundane tasks. The flitting thoughts could also serve as a “spontaneous mental time travel,” which helps to thread together a person’s past, present and future experiences, suggest the researchers.
Of course, there’s one more possibility. Perhaps, the scientists wrote in the journal Science, “the mind may wander simply because it can.”