Daydreaming while doing simple tasks, such as planning a doctor’s appointment or tomorrow’s outfit on the way to class, may be an indicator of a better working memory, according to a recent study in “Psychological Science.”
The study showed that while doing low-load tasks that do not take up a person’s full attention, people who daydream or think about other things while doing the task had a higher working memory capacity – memory that holds temporary information – than those whose minds did not drift off to other things.
Jonathan Smallwood from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Science, one of the study’s researchers, said in a University of Wisconsin-Madison News article that while the brain is in idle, it tends to think about pressing matters.
“What this study seems to suggest is that when circumstances for the task aren’t very difficult, people who have additional working memory resources deploy them to think about things other than what they’re doing,” Smallwood said. “Their brains are trying to allocate resources to the most pressing problems.”
To conduct the experiment, researches asked volunteers to perform one of two simple tasks. They pressed a button in response to the appearance of a certain letter on a screen or tapped a button in time with their breathing.
While doing these tasks, the researchers periodically asked the volunteers if they were fully focused on what they were doing or if their minds were wandering to other things.
To measure the participants’ working memory capacity, the researchers asked the volunteers to recall letters that they were asked to memorize before the tests and complete a series of easy math problems.
“We intentionally use tasks that will never use all of their attention,” Smallwood said, “and then we ask, ‘How do people use their idle resources?’”
Researchers found that individuals with higher working memory resources reported more task-unrelated thoughts. When they gave the volunteers a task but filled them with sensory distractors, their mind’s ability to wander completely turned off.
“Giving your full attention to your perceptual experience actually equalized people, as though it cut off mind wandering at the pass,” said Daniel Levinson, one of the study’s researchers, in the article.
Dr. Michael Hasselmo, a Boston U. psychology professor, said the study seemed valid but not strong because of how difficult it is collect that type of data.
“Just looking at their data it seems that they had effects that were significant but not really strong because there was a broad level of data intuitive level,” Hasselmo said. “We hear stories about people like Einstein daydreaming in class, and maybe high IQ is related to this. But this is just anecdotal; no one has really looked into this specific case.”