Brain study finds the stuff of daydreaming
By Reuters

Daydreaming seems to be the default setting of the human mind and certain brain regions are devoted to it, U.S. researchers reported on Friday.

"There is this network of regions that always seems to be active when you don't give people something to do," psychologist Malia Mason of Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital said in a telephone interview.

"But I find that the vast majority of time, people aren't having fanciful thoughts. People are thinking about what they have to do later today," she went on.

Her team has chosen to call it stimulus-independent thought or mind wandering. Neurologists and psychologists have debated what goes on when people are not specifically thinking about or doing something, and there had been general agreement that the mind does not simply go blank.

Mason's team set up an experiment using the relatively new technology of functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI to see what is going on.

"In the absence of a task that requires deliberative processing, the mind generally tends to wander, flitting from one thought to the next with fluidity and ease," the researchers wrote.

One possibility, her team said, is that the brain always does something so that it is in an active state when quick thoughts or reactions are needed.

"A second possibility is that as a kind of spontaneous mental time travel lends a sense of coherence to one's past, present, and future experiences," the researchers wrote.

"We are not stuck in the here and now. We can be stuck in our car in traffic and we are not (mentally) stuck there," Mason added.

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