Quit working, start daydreaming!

On the heels of the WILB work that I couldn’t find a reference for, I find another interesting study that blows a hole in the “time on task” mantra. Kalina Christoff and a team of collaborators at UBC recently published a paper – Experience sampling during fMRI reveals default network and executive system contributions to mind wandering (doi:10.1073/pnas.0900234106) (Discover Magazine) that suggests that a wandering mind helps improve a concurrent activity. The catch is that this phenomena is most notable when the subject is not aware of the wandering. Now I don’t know how this might happen – not knowing that your mind is wandering, but I have a good hunch that it has something to do with “flow” and “being in the zone”. Speaking of being in the zone, this “unwitting wandering” might be related to the improvement of vocabulary scores after watching sports – Sports experience changes the neural processing of action language. Sian L. Beilock et.al (doi: 10.1073/pnas.0803424105)