Posts Tagged ‘daydreaming’

Archimedes, Daydreaming and You

June 18th, 2010

I have a tendency to daydream.  I will be listening to, or participating in, a conversation and before I realize that instead of listening, I’m in my own little dream world.  I try not to, but sometimes it happens.  As it turns out, my daydreaming might be a good thing.

Many people say their best thinking often comes in the shower.  Archimedes is said to have jumped out of his bath tub, running naked through the streets, yelling “Eureka!  I got it!”  While I don’t recommend running naked through the streets, I will promote taking a break to daydream, leading to your own “Eureka!” moment. 

According to various studies, we spend almost one-third of our time daydreaming.  When we give our brain a “break,” it is actually activating areas of the brain associated with complex problem solving.  Kalina Christoff, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of British Columbia says, “People assumed that when your mind wandered it was empty. .. mind wandering is a much more active state than we ever imagined, much more active than during reasoning with a complex problem.”  She goes on to say that an unfocused mind connects new ideas and unexpected associations better than analytical reasoning.  

Over the last five years, two researchers at Northwestern University have used brain scanners and EEG sensors to find out what causes that “Eureka!” or “aha” moment.  They studied people who were stumped with a word problem and suddenly came up with a solution they knew to be right.  Turns out the brain sends signals from its right hemisphere, which controls associations and putting things together, a third of a second before the “aha” moment strikes.  That is immediately followed by a set of signals from the visualization part of the brain.  This second set of signals allows you to really solidify the idea in your head.

While we don’t know what kinds of topics or problems can trigger an “aha” moment, researches say a positive mood can increase the chances of coming to an insightful thinking.  As Dr. Jung-Beeman says, “How you are thinking beforehand is going to affect what you do with the problems you get.” 

So, you may now be thinking, what does Arcimedes have to do with rural communities?  Often I think our rural communities think too logically and are too pessimistically about their futures.  It seems like they don’t want to risk getting their collective hope up only to be let down when their dreams don’t come true.  In doing so, they deny the creative juices that work their way to the surface.  When we try too hard to fix a problem, the solution seems harder and harder to grasp. 

Maybe, instead, a community can get together and encourage all members, from the youngest to the oldest, to come up with ideas.  Ask, if we had unlimited resources and visitors and time and volunteers, what could we do?  Encourage the positive, creative thinking that comes from daydreaming about a future.  Maybe then a community can finally see what they have been missing and start working towards a new solution.

To learn more, check out this article by Newsweek magazine and this one from Psychology Today.

 

Photo Credit:  Ashley R. Good

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