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Daydreaming is a stream of consciousness that detaches from current, external tasks when attention drifts to a more personal and internal direction.
There are various names of this phenomenon including mind-wandering, fantasy, spontaneous thoughts, etc. There are many types of daydreams, however the most common characteristic 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.
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. [1]
Daydreaming consists of self-generated thought comprising three distinct categories: thoughts concerning the future and oneself, reflections on the past and others, and the emotional tone of experiences. [2]
Psychologist Jerome Singer established three different types of daydreaming and their characteristics, varying in their cognitive states and emotional experiences. These included positive constructive daydreaming, characterized by constructive engagement, planning, pleasant thoughts, vivid imagery, and curiosity; guilty-dysphoric daydreaming, marked by obsessive, guilt-ridden, and anguished fantasies; and poor attentional control, reflecting difficulty focusing on either internal thoughts or external tasks.
Different daydreaming styles have various effects on different behaviours such as creativity [3]
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. [4]
This function of daydreaming is associated with increased creativity in individuals. [5] The frequency of daydreaming is the highest during simple tasks. [6] It is hypothesized that daydreaming plays an important role in generating creative problem-solving processes. [7] Studies have found that intentional daydreaming is more effective when focused on creative thought processing, rather than spontaneous or disruptive daydreams. [4]
Attentional cycling is an adaptive function of daydreaming through which a person’s attention may cycle through multiple target problems at the same time, helping the individual remain positive. When people have a variety of goals, daydreaming can provide an opportunity for people to alternate across different streams of information and thoughts in a healthy way. [7]
A change in the daydreaming state can lead to dishabituation, a function that can be beneficial during a learning process as it renews attention and interest in stimuli that have become repetitive. One research identified this effect in learning and showed that learning is more effective with distributed practices over time rather than massed practices all at once. [8] Daydreaming can provide a break to allow thoughts to drift away from intensive learning . When you return, you will be able to focus again with the ability to continue focusing on attention-demanding tasks. [7]
When people are performing mundane 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 they are necessary. As a result, daydreaming can cause the perception that time moves more quickly. [7]
Daydreaming can also be used to imagine social situations. Social daydreaming is imagining past social occurrences and future events and conversations. [9] According to research, daydreaming and social cognition have strong overlapping similarities when activated portions of the brain are observed. [10] [11] 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.
The correlation between social daydreaming and positive social relationships suggests that daydreaming about close others can enhance social well-being, [12] reduce loneliness, [13] and increase relationship satisfaction. [14] Recent studies indicate that social daydreaming serves immediate socio-emotional regulation purposes, [15] particularly in fostering feelings of love and connection, suggesting its adaptive role in achieving goals.
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. [16] [10]
There has yet to be a consensus on how the process of mind wandering occurs. [17] Three theories have been devised to explain the occurrences and reasons behind why people daydream. These theories are the distractibility account, executive-function account, and the decoupling account. [18]
The distractibility account theorizes that distracting stimuli, whether internal or external, reflect a failure to disregard or control distractions in the mind. [19] According to this theory, the brain activity increases in response to an increase in attention to mind-wandering and the mind tends to dwell on task unrelated thoughts (TUT's). [18]
The executive-function account theorizes that the mind fails to correctly process task relevant events. This theory is based on the observation of TUT causes an increase in errors regarding task focused thinking, especially tasks requiring executive control. [17] [18]
The decoupling account suggests that attention becomes removed, or decoupled, from perceptual information involving an external task, and couples to an internal process. In this process, TUT is enhanced as internal thoughts are disengaged from surrounding distractions as the participant ‘tunes out’ the surrounding environment. [18] [19]
Freudian psychology interpreted daydreaming as an expression of the repressed instincts, similarly to those revealing themselves in nighttime dreams. In contrast to nighttime dreams, there seems to be a process of "secondary revision" in fantasies that makes them more lucid, like daydreaming. The state of daydreaming is a kind of liminal state between waking (with the ability to think rationally and logically) and sleeping. [20]
Daydreaming can also be used to reveal personal aspects about an individual. In an experiment directed by Robert Desoille, subjects were asked to imagine different objects over the course of different rounds. Those who imagined more details and sleek objects often saw themselves as more useful and held the belief that they were more capable of growth. Through the daydream, which involved many fantastical elements, characteristics such as a fear of men or a desire to subdue a selfish personality trait were often revealed. [21]
Self-focused daydreaming can be positive (i.e. a self-reflection) or negative (i.e. a rumination). [17] This will result in either increased happiness, anti-depressant thinking, rational planning, creativity, and positivism, or conversely, over-thinking negative experiences from the past, pessimistic views of the future, negative mood-episodes, guilt, fear, and poor attention controls. [22] [17]
Eric Klinger's research in the 1980s showed that most daydreams are about ordinary, everyday events and help to remind us of mundane tasks. Klinger's research also showed that over 75% of workers in "boring jobs", such as lifeguards and truck drivers, use vivid daydreams to "ease the boredom" of their routine tasks. [23]
Some of the major costs of daydreaming summarized by the review are worse performances with reading, sustained attention, mood etc. [7]
The negative consequences of daydreaming on reading performance have been studied the most thoroughly. Research shows that there is a negative correlation between daydreaming frequency and reading comprehension performance, specifically worsened item-specific comprehension and model-building ability. [7]
Disruptive daydreams or spontaneous daydreaming is also characteristic of people with attention-deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD). [24] [25]
Negative mood is another association of daydreaming. Research finds people generally report lower happiness when they are daydreaming than when they are not. For those experiencing positive daydreaming, the same happiness rating is reported between current tasks and pleasant things they are more likely to daydream about. This finding remains true across all activities. [7]
In the late 19th century, Toni Nelson argued that some daydreams with grandiose fantasies are self-gratifying attempts at "wish fulfillment". In the 1950s, some educational psychologists warned parents not to let their children daydream, for fear that the children may be sucked into "neurosis and even psychosis". [23]
While the cost of daydreaming is more thoroughly discussed, the associated benefit is understudied. One potential reason is the payoff of daydreaming is usually private and hidden compared to the measurable cost from external goal-directed tasks. It is hard to know and record people's private thoughts such as personal goals and dreams, so whether daydreaming supports these thoughts is difficult to discuss. [1]
Select research has argued that the mind is not idle during daydreaming, though it is at rest when not attentively engaging in external tasks. Rather, during this process, people indulge themselves in and reflect on fantasies, memories, future goals and psychological selves while still being able to control enough attention to keep easy tasks going and monitor the external environment. Thus, the potential benefits are the skills of internal reflection developed in daydreaming to connect emotional implication of daily life experience with personal meaning building process. [26]
Despite the detrimental impact of daydreaming on aptitude tests which most educational institutions put heavy emphasis on, scholars argue that it is important for children to get internal reflection skills from daydreaming. Research shows that children equipped with these skills have higher academic ability and are socially and emotionally better off. [26]
Besides believing that daydreaming is motivated by unconscious drives and desires, Sigmund Freud [27] also acknowledges that daydreaming can become excessive or pathological in some cases. Such instances can manifest as hysteria, neurosis, and psychopathology. When daydreaming becomes too detached from reality or interferes with everyday functioning, it may be indicative of deeper psychological issues or neurotic conflicts. While Freud didn’t explicitly correlate daydreaming to mental illness, he suggests that certain types of daydreams reflect underlying psychological disturbances.
Various studies have also focused on maladaptive daydreaming, which describes vivid and elaborate daydreams for prolonged periods of time. [28] Individuals who are affected by maladaptive daydreaming often neglect their real-life relationships and obligations, leading to clinical distress and impaired functioning. According to research [29] the most common comorbidities associated with maladaptive daydreaming include attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, anxiety disorders, major depressive disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Research on daydreaming faces challenges due to the difficulty in observing and measuring it compared to other mental tasks. [30] Instead of making broad conclusions about its benefits or drawbacks, researchers should focus on how the content and form of daydreams relate to specific adaptive outcomes. This involves using intensive longitudinal methods to track daydreams in real-world settings and linking them to measurable goals. Integration with social psychological theory can help understand how social daydreams impact social interactions and goal achievement. Combining neuroimaging studies with experience-sampling studies can offer insights into the neural mechanisms underlying the effects of daydreaming on social navigation. [31]
Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning.
In psychology, a mood is an affective state. In contrast to emotions or feelings, moods are less specific, less intense and less likely to be provoked or instantiated by a particular stimulus or event. Moods are typically described as having either a positive or negative valence. In other words, people usually talk about being in a good mood or a bad mood. There are many different factors that influence mood, and these can lead to positive or negative effects on mood.
Social cognition is a topic within psychology that focuses on how people process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations. It focuses on the role that cognitive processes play in social interactions.
Creativity techniques are methods that encourage creative actions, whether in the arts or sciences. They focus on a variety of aspects of creativity, including techniques for idea generation and divergent thinking, methods of re-framing problems, changes in the affective environment and so on. They can be used as part of problem solving, artistic expression, or therapy.
Cognitive development is a field of study in neuroscience and psychology focusing on a child's development in terms of information processing, conceptual resources, perceptual skill, language learning, and other aspects of the developed adult brain and cognitive psychology. Qualitative differences between how a child processes their waking experience and how an adult processes their waking experience are acknowledged. Cognitive development is defined as the emergence of the ability to consciously cognize, understand, and articulate their understanding in adult terms. Cognitive development is how a person perceives, thinks, and gains understanding of their world through the relations of genetic and learning factors. There are four stages to cognitive information development. They are, reasoning, intelligence, language, and memory. These stages start when the baby is about 18 months old, they play with toys, listen to their parents speak, they watch TV, anything that catches their attention helps build their cognitive development.
Metacognition is an awareness of one's thought processes and an understanding of the patterns behind them. The term comes from the root word meta, meaning "beyond", or "on top of". Metacognition can take many forms, such as reflecting on one's ways of thinking and knowing when and how to use particular strategies for problem-solving. There are generally two components of metacognition: (1) knowledge about cognition and (2) regulation of cognition. Research has shown that both components of metacognition play key roles in learning. A metacognitive model differs from other scientific models in that the creator of the model is per definition also enclosed within it. Scientific models are often prone to distancing the observer from the object or field of study whereas a metacognitive model in general tries to include the observer in the model.
Affect, in psychology, refers to the underlying experience of feeling, emotion, attachment, or mood. In psychology, "affect" refers to the experience of feeling or emotion. It encompasses a wide range of emotional states and can be positive or negative. Affect is a fundamental aspect of human experience and plays a central role in many psychological theories and studies. It can be understood as a combination of three components: emotion, mood, and affectivity. In psychology, the term "affect" is often used interchangeably with several related terms and concepts, though each term may have slightly different nuances. These terms encompass: emotion, feeling, mood, emotional state, sentiment, affective state, emotional response, affective reactivity, disposition. Researchers and psychologists may employ specific terms based on their focus and the context of their work.
In psychology, a dual process theory provides an account of how thought can arise in two different ways, or as a result of two different processes. Often, the two processes consist of an implicit (automatic), unconscious process and an explicit (controlled), conscious process. Verbalized explicit processes or attitudes and actions may change with persuasion or education; though implicit process or attitudes usually take a long amount of time to change with the forming of new habits. Dual process theories can be found in social, personality, cognitive, and clinical psychology. It has also been linked with economics via prospect theory and behavioral economics, and increasingly in sociology through cultural analysis.
Mind-wandering is loosely defined as thoughts that are not produced from the current task. Mind-wandering consists of thoughts that are task-unrelated and stimulus-independent. This can be in the form of three different subtypes: positive constructive daydreaming, guilty fear of failure, and poor attentional control.
In the field of psychology, absent-mindedness is a mental state wherein a person is forgetfully inattentive. It is the opposite mental state of mindfulness.
In neuroscience, the default mode network (DMN), also known as the default network, default state network, or anatomically the medial frontoparietal network (M-FPN), is a large-scale brain network primarily composed of the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, precuneus and angular gyrus. It is best known for being active when a person is not focused on the outside world and the brain is at wakeful rest, such as during daydreaming and mind-wandering. It can also be active during detailed thoughts related to external task performance. Other times that the DMN is active include when the individual is thinking about others, thinking about themselves, remembering the past, and planning for the future.
Some of the research that is conducted in the field of psychology is more "fundamental" than the research conducted in the applied psychological disciplines, and does not necessarily have a direct application. The subdisciplines within psychology that can be thought to reflect a basic-science orientation include biological psychology, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, and so on. Research in these subdisciplines is characterized by methodological rigor. The concern of psychology as a basic science is in understanding the laws and processes that underlie behavior, cognition, and emotion. Psychology as a basic science provides a foundation for applied psychology. Applied psychology, by contrast, involves the application of psychological principles and theories yielded up by the basic psychological sciences; these applications are aimed at overcoming problems or promoting well-being in areas such as mental and physical health and education.
Embodied cognition is the concept suggesting that many features of cognition are shaped by the state and capacities of the organism. The cognitive features include a wide spectrum of cognitive functions, such as perception biases, memory recall, comprehension and high-level mental constructs and performance on various cognitive tasks. The bodily aspects involve the motor system, the perceptual system, the bodily interactions with the environment (situatedness), and the assumptions about the world built the functional structure of organism's brain and body.
Unconscious cognition is the processing of perception, memory, learning, thought, and language without being aware of it.
Jonathan Smallwood is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at Queen's University at Kingston in Ontario, Canada. His research uses the tools of cognitive neuroscience to investigate the process by which the brain self generates thoughts not arising from perception, such as during the experience of mind-wandering and daydreaming. For the last two years he has been recognised as one of the world's most highly cited scientists.
Jonathan Schooler, is an American psychologist and Distinguished Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who researches various topics that intersect aspects of both cognitive psychology and philosophy such as: Belief in free will, Meta-awareness, Mindfulness, Mind-Wandering, Memory, Creativity, and Emotion. Schooler is also known for his sometimes controversial research on topics such as Anomalous Cognition and the decline effect.
Perseverative cognition is a collective term in psychology for continuous thinking about negative events in the past or in the future.
Sex differences in cognition are widely studied in the current scientific literature. Biological and genetic differences in combination with environment and culture have resulted in the cognitive differences among males and females. Among biological factors, hormones such as testosterone and estrogen may play some role mediating these differences. Among differences of diverse mental and cognitive abilities, the largest or most well known are those relating to spatial abilities, social cognition and verbal skills and abilities.
Maladaptive daydreaming, also called excessive daydreaming, is when an individual experiences excessive daydreaming that interferes with daily life. It is a proposed diagnosis of a disordered form of dissociative absorption, associated with excessive fantasy that is not recognized by any major medical or psychological criteria. Maladaptive daydreaming can result in distress, can replace human interaction and may interfere with normal functioning such as social life or work. Maladaptive daydreaming is not a widely recognized diagnosis and is not found in any major diagnostic manual of psychiatry or medicine. The term was coined in 2002 by Eli Somer of the University of Haifa. Somer's definition of the proposed condition is "extensive fantasy activity that replaces human interaction and/or interferes with academic, interpersonal, or vocational functioning." There has been limited research outside of Somer's.
Social cognitive neuroscience is the scientific study of the biological processes underpinning social cognition. Specifically, it uses the tools of neuroscience to study "the mental mechanisms that create, frame, regulate, and respond to our experience of the social world". Social cognitive neuroscience uses the epistemological foundations of cognitive neuroscience, and is closely related to social neuroscience. Social cognitive neuroscience employs human neuroimaging, typically using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Human brain stimulation techniques such as transcranial magnetic stimulation and transcranial direct-current stimulation are also used. In nonhuman animals, direct electrophysiological recordings and electrical stimulation of single cells and neuronal populations are utilized for investigating lower-level social cognitive processes.