It's the end of the working week, with the promise of the weekend looming ahead in all its glory? and I bet you, like me, have already fallen into the soothing lap of a daydream. Gazing out of the window, the mind wanders aimless, floating free as a cloud, flitting from one notion to another?
Sorry, where was I? Yes, the point of all this random daydreaming - for it turns out, there is
a point - is apparently to allow the brain to remain in "standby" mode during a lull in tasks, a bit like a car idling between gears at the lights.
"This type of thought could be a sort of 'default' state of the mind, a psychological baseline," says Malia Mason
, who carried out brain scans of people either carrying out complex mental tasks or daydreaming.
The scans showed a distinct pattern in brain activity when people were daydreaming
, which involved a complex network of disparate brain areas. Mason explains that a wandering mind still leaves the brain in an optimal state of arousal so it is primed for more purposeful tasks, yet it allows people to remain only as alert as they need to be during mundane tasks.
Perfect. Although, irritatingly enough, despite all the hours of practice I devote to the cause, I find it difficult to achieve perfect randomness of thought. Instead, my mind gets suckered into the same few streams of consciousness that I struggle to escape - particular worries, wonderings and imaginings, such as "I must remember to file my tax forms?"
Do you suffer this problem? Have you learned some kind of trick for escaping the thought-grabbers?Gaia Vince, Online Deputy Editor