Life
Daydreaming is a very human characteristic. Wool-gathering, drifting away, zoning out: whatever you call it, many of us are subject to flights of fancy, often when we're bored or just as a way to pass the time. But our ability to wander off into our own imaginations, whether it's during dreary lectures or at home, is more important than it might seem, no matter what your fourth-grade teacher said. Why do we daydream? "Mind-wandering," a collection of Israeli scientists wrote in Frontiers In Human Neuroscience in 2011, "is among the most robust and permanent expressions of human conscious awareness, classically regarded by philosophers, clinicians, and scientists as a core element of an intact sense of self." We're increasingly understanding its evolutionary role, what it means for brain function, and why it's so important to let yourself zone out every so often.
The evolutionary role of the human imagination, which plays a large role in daydreaming, is pretty well-established: it's that speculative ability to conjure up imaginary scenarios that differ from the reality that has given humankind an evolutionary edge, granting us the capability to imagine solutions, long-term results, new ideas and entire castles in the air to conquer huge issues. Daydreaming, which is imagination plus distraction, has its own values — and while they might not save you from an annoyed boss when you're obviously thinking of something else during the staff meeting, they're still very important.
It Seems To Have A Strong Social Function
Daydreaming, more often than not, plays a kind of social function and involves other people, from sexual fantasy with imaginary partners, to actual people in our lives. One study cited by Scientific American noted that 73 percent of daydreams seemed to involve other people. (It's important to realize that studying daydreams is hard, because we very rarely monitor them closely as they're happening, and people aware of their daydreams in a study might not report quite what happens in them, in case the contents are embarrassing or surreal.)
But the ability to daydream about our potential interactions with those around us, imaginary or not, may have important social appeal. It's been suggested that romantic daydreaming might be particularly useful for humans to evaluate their potential partners and how they might react in particular situations, aiding their choosiness and thus their choice of mate. It also seems to be a reflection of our social world. People who daydream of their current relationships and family have been found to be more content and socially connected than those who regularly daydreamed of exes, fantasy characters, celebrities or strangers.
It's Also Important To Our Sense Of Self
The fact that different kinds of memory are also centered in the default mode network isn't an accident. Alongside imagining alternative ideas and possibilities, daydreaming also gives us access to imagined futures and aspects of our past, according to researchers. The importance of daydreaming for knowing ourselves, particularly through memory, is pretty strong: research has found, for example, that dementia tends to affect the parts of the mind that involve the default mode network, and so produces both an inability to daydream and an inability to remember. The effects on your sense of self can be devastating. "Mind-wandering, whether its content is directly related to the thinker or not, is a self-related, self-generated, self-sustaining function," say the Israeli scientists; "it serves as an integral part of self awareness, a pre-requisite for healthy psychological functioning."
There are, however, unhealthy and pathological types of daydreaming. A professor of clinical psychology named Eli Somer came up with the idea of "maladaptive daydreaming" in 2002, elaborating on a phenomenon of addictive daydreaming: vanishing into your own imagined world for hours at a time, secretively, and choosing it over interactions with the real world, friends or family. Around a quarter of maladaptive daydreamers, according to further research by Somer and others, had been abused as children, but it's not always the case. Obsessive compulsive disorder, with its characteristic intrusive thoughts, may be an co-existing issue, but the phenomenon is rare and as yet not widely studied or included in the DSM, the main diagnostic source for psychological issues.
Daydreaming in normal amounts is, however, healthy, normal, and apparently a sign of a well-functioning and efficient brain. So don't feel ashamed when you find yourself staring out the window for the umpteenth time today. Take that, fourth grade teacher.