"If your mind didn't wander, then you'd be largely shackled to whatever you are doing right now," says Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. "But instead you can engage in mental time travel and other kinds of simulation. During a daydream, your thoughts are really unbounded."Our persuasion of children to stop daydreaming and focus might actually be detrimental to their development and society as a whole.
It is this ability to tune out the present moment and contemplate the make-believe that separates the human mind from every other. "Daydreaming builds on this fundamental capacity people have for being able to project themselves into imaginary situations, like the future," Malia Mason, a neuroscientist at Columbia, says. "Without that skill, we'd be pretty limited creatures."
After monitoring the daily schedule of the children for several months, Belton came to the conclusion that their lack of imagination was, at least in part, caused by the absence of "empty time," or periods without any activity or sensory stimulation. She noticed that as soon as these children got even a little bit bored, they simply turned on the television: the moving images kept their minds occupied. "It was a very automatic reaction," she says. "Television was what they did when they didn't know what else to do."The article continues on to define types of daydreaming and the implications on autism, schizophrenia, and the aging brain.
Early on in my career, right before a pressing deadline, I was caught by my boss surfing the net with a glazed expression. I was flustered, but she smiled and said,
"Thinking is not a linear process."
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