Many people think daydreaming is bad for their emotions and has negative effects on their life and those around them. It makes adapting to life very hard and brains work less effectively.
Contrary to common ideas, the brains of people who are daydreaming might not stop working, but may be working harder, new research has shown. Scientists scanned the brains of people lying inside magnetic resonance imaging（MRI）machines, as they pushed buttons or rested in turn. The scans showed that the "default（默认的）network" deep inside a human brain becomes more active during daydreaming.
In a surprise finding, the scans also showed strong activity in the executive network, the outlying region of the brain associated with complex problem-solving, says Professor Kalina Christoff, who is a co-author of the study. "People assume that when the mind wanders away, it just gets turned off but we show the opposite. When it wanders, it is turned on." says Christoff.
The findings, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest, "People who let themselves daydream might not think in the same focused way as when performing a goal-oriented task, but they bring in more mental and brain resources," says Christoff.
F. Diane Barth said at Psychology Today that the more we daydream, the more our brain is able to hold onto the task when we are being bombarded （轰炸）from all sides by all kinds of noises, information input, and conflicting demands. You're not trying to escape the task at hand; rather, you're trying to get rid of all of the information and stimuli（刺激物）that could pose as bothers.
According to Christoff, people typically spend one third of their waking time daydreaming. "It is a big part of our lives, but it has been largely ignored by science, she says. "The study is the first to use MRIs to study brain activity during spontaneous thoughts and subjective experiences. Until now the only way is to use self-reports that are not always reliable."
