Daydreaming is the stream of consciousness that detaches from current, external tasks when attention drifts to a more personal and internal direction. When thoughts move to a different place while daydreaming it’s referred to as mind wandering. This commonality affects individuals 50% of the time while awake. Daydreaming is the term used by Jerome L. Singer whose research laid the foundation for nearly all the subsequent research today. The terminologies assigned by researchers today puts challenges on identifying the common features of daydreaming, and on building collective work among researchers.
There are many types of daydreams, and there is no consistent definition among psychologists. However, the characteristic that is common to all forms of daydreaming meets the criteria for mild dissociation. Also, the impacts of different types of daydreams are not identical. While some are disruptive and deleterious, others may be beneficial in some way.
Functions of daydreaming
Mooneyham and Schooler summarized five potential functions daydreaming serves: future thinking, creative thinking, attentional cycling, dishabituation and relief from boredom.
Daydreaming can be a useful tool to help keep people mindful of their relevant goals, such as imagining future success of a goal to motivate accomplishing a difficult or uninteresting task.
Creative thinking is another function of daydreaming associated with increased creativity. The frequency of daydreaming is the highest during undemanding and easy tasks. It is hypothesized that daydreaming plays an important role in generating creative problem-solving processes. Studies have also found that intentional daydreaming is more effective when focused on creative thought processing, rather than spontaneous or disruptive daydreams.
Attentional cycling is an adaptive function of daydreaming that helps to keep people's behaviors relatively optimal when there are multiple target problems at the same time. When people have many goals, daydreaming provides an opportunity for people to switch among different streams of information and thoughts.
Dishabituation is beneficial when the internal response to the external stimulus decreases as the external stimulus repeats during learning process. One research identified this effect in learning and showed that learning is more effective with distributed practices rather than massed practices. Daydreaming can provide the opportunity to allow thoughts to drift away from intensive learning temporarily and to focus again with the refreshed capability to continue focusing on attention-demanding tasks.
Relief from boredom is another function of daydreaming. When people are doing boring tasks, daydreaming allows their thoughts to detach from current external tasks to relieve boredom. At the same time, this temporary detachment will not stop external activities completely when these activities are necessary. Also, daydreaming can cause the perception that time moves more quickly.
Daydreaming can also be used to imagine social situations. Humans are naturally oriented to be social in behavior and actively seek the approval and company of others. Social daydreaming is imagining past social occurrences and future events and conversations. According to research, daydreaming and social cognition have strong overlapping similarities when activated portions of the brain are observed. These findings indicate that daydreaming is an extension of the brain's experience of social cognition. This is likely because daydreams are often focused on the mental representations of social events, experiences, and people. It was also observed that a large portion of implicitly occurring daydreams, approximately 71%, were social. According to recent research, it was also found that positive rumination caused increases in the imagining of positive future events. Negative rumination caused an increase in thoughts of negative future events in depressed individuals but did not cause a significant increase in thoughts of negative future events in those who were not depressed.
Default mode network
According to several studies, daydreaming appears to be the brain's default setting when no other external task is occupying its attention. A group of regions in the brain called the default mode network is lit up only when the brain is left in a sort of ‘idle’ state. These areas of the brain light up in sequence only when daydreaming.