In Brief
- Daydreams are an inner world where we can rehearse the future and imagine new adventures without risk. Allowing the mind to roam freely can aid creativity—but only if we pay attention to the content of our daydreams.
- Neuroscientists have identified the “default network”—a web of brain regions that become active when we mentally drift away from the task at hand into our own reveries.
- When daydreaming turns addictive and compulsive, it can overwhelm normal functioning, impeding relationships and work.
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When Rachel Stein (not her real name) was a small child, she would pace around in a circle shaking a string for hours at a time, mentally spinning intricate alternative plots for her favorite television shows. Usually she was the star—the imaginary seventh child in The Brady Bunch, for example. “Around the age of eight or nine, my older brother said, ‘You’re doing this on the front lawn, and the neighbors are looking at you. You just can’t do it anymore,’ ” Stein recalls. So
she retreated to her bedroom, reveling in her elaborate reveries alone. As she grew older, the television shows changed—first General Hospital, then The West Wing—but her intense need to immerse herself in her imaginary world did not.
This article was originally published with the title Living in a Dream World.
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Add CommentAbout: Living in a Dream World: The Role of Daydreaming in Problem-Solving and CreativityDaydreaming can help solve problems, trigger creativity, and inspire great works of art and science. When it becomes compulsive, however, the consequences can be dire
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBy Josie Glausiusz
Recent research in AI has demonstrated that it is perhaps because our brains are not perfect, that they are subject to day dreaming, to local contradictions that we become really creative unlike to the "perfect" machine thinking, even in the best possible technology.
Isaac Asimov has provided the best analysis of men thinking versus machine thinking in his great Robots and Empire,Balantine Books, NY 1985Page 54
In this Robots series, appears a human detective “Elijah Bayley” and two high performing humanoid robots who serve as field support to the human detective…
The two robots are Giskard and Daneel. Giskard, is trying to understand human thinking. He tells Danneel: “Human beings have ways of thinking about human beings that we have not. Giskard’s is searching for the “laws of humanics” which he is assuming to regulate human thinking just as the famous Asimov’s three laws of robotics regulate “robots thinking’ and actions.
Giskard has searched whole universities libraries, trying to discover if such laws governing human behaviour ever existed or if they could be deducted from past human behaviour analysis.
Giskard: “Every generalisation that I try to make, however broad and simple has its numerous exceptions. Yet if such laws existed and if I could find them, I could understand human beings and be more confident that I am obeying the Three laws in better fashion.
“Since detective Elijah understood human beings, he must have have had some knowledge of the laws of Humanics.”
Daneel: “Presumably. But he knew through something that human beings call intuition, a word I don’t understand, a concept I know nothing of. Presumably it lies beyond reason at my command.”
I'm adding(The capacity people have to go beyond the information given (Jerome Bruner))
Giskard: “That and [robot Memory!] Memory that doesn’t work after human fashion, of course. It lacked the imperfect recall, the fuzziness, the addition and subtractions dictated by wishfull thinking and self interest, to say nothing of the lingerings and lacunae and backtracking that can turn memory into hour-long day-dreaming. we robots have robotic memory ticking off the events exactly as they had happened, but in vastly hastened fashion. The seconds reeled off in nanoseconds…