Dream On Kids… dream on all day

I’ve posted before on WILB and how the use of small distractions might actually be beneficial for people who are working on the computer. But what about those people who are not on the computer? All they have access to is their imagination, and specifically, their day dreams. Could those help do the same thing? Well it seems that they can. Kalina Christoff, Alan M. Gordon, Jonathan Smallwood, Rachelle Smith, and Jonathan W. Schooler. (Experience sampling during fMRI reveals default network and executive system contributions to mind wandering. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2009; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0900234106) have a paper that is just over a year old talking about this and how it can be important. So why is this post worthy today? Well I was in a meeting and I noticed myself getting unfocused and then my mind started to wander and I thought about the WILB materials I had dug up a while ago because there is a debate raging in my inbox about the value of monitoring web use (Facebook, Olympics et al) and it occurred to me that I was WILBing without the computer. Getting back to the office, and I found that there was indeed research that suggests that daydreaming is an important part of a creative, healthy mind.