When I was a young salesman at AT&T I was sitting quietly at my desk, daydreaming about several of my clients and how I was going to get them to accept some relatively bad news about upcoming changes to their communication costs. My boss walked by my cube, saw me sitting there and asked, "Ron, what are you doing?"
Annoyed I said, "Thinking."
"Well, stop that and get to work," he barked and stomped on to spread more motivation to the troops.
While we all may concede that mental rehearsals of future events is a good strategy, it might have other benefits as well.
The use of fMRI technology to study the brain is a relatively new thing, but it has been around long enough that people are beginning to notice stuff that they are not deliberately trying to study. Like the fact when the technicians ask you to lie in the scanner and let your mind go blank, it can't be done (when first noticed, it fascinated some researchers). Even when defocusing, the brain's activity is pretty intense.
Back in 2008 a group of researchers showed that the brain's "default network," the way it operates when not attending to a task (lying in a scanner) is not as fully developed in youth as in adulthood. In this case "network" means the overall connections between very disparate portions of the brain. These researchers speculated on several different ideas about how this network develops over the course of life.
A paper completed in September, 2009 by Ming Song, Yong Liu, Yuan Zhou, Kun Wang, Chunsui Yu, and Tianzi Jiang demonstrates that the smarter you are, the more connections you have. Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli and John Gabrieli speculate about this research in a recent Scientific American article.
This type of hard evidence suggests we should become better at learning how to develop these connections in a person's life over time. It lends support to the idea of learning something new (exercising brain parts you don't normal use), developing a larger appetite for a range of activities we know are associated with different brain regions (music, art, math, group interaction, etc.). It has even been suggested that developing the ability to intentionally daydream might help stimulate greater connectivity. Mental rehearsals are a type of directed daydreaming, so who knows, maybe it not only helps prepare for a specific task - it could help make you smarter over time.
So maybe we should teach children to daydream well instead of not daydream at all. And maybe we should not be so quick to axe the arts and music departments' budget.
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