BehindTheMedspeak: Daydreaming is the default setting of the human mind

That's the short version of the results of a new study just published in Science magazine.

Malia F. Mason, a Harvard Medical School psychologist and lead author of the study said, in a summary of the work that appeared in yesterday's Washington Post, "There is this network of regions that always seems to be active when you don't give people something to do."

Here's the abstract of the Science report.

Wandering Minds: The Default Network and Stimulus-Independent Thought

Despite evidence pointing to a ubiquitous tendency of human minds to wander, little is known about the neural operations that support this core component of human cognition.

Using both thought sampling and brain imaging, the current investigation demonstrated that mind-wandering is associated with activity in a default network of cortical regions that are active when the brain is "at rest."

In addition, individuals' reports of the tendency of their minds to wander were correlated with activity in this network.

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Here's a link to an overview of the paper, appearing in the same issue of Science magazine.

This Week in Science

Despite the preponderance of daydreaming during everyday life, little is known about its neurocognitive underpinnings. How does the brain spontaneously produce the images, voices, thoughts, and feelings that constitute stimulus-independent thought? By analyzing functional magnetic resonance imaging signals associated with a cognitive task that was shown to induce a high frequency of mind-wandering, Mason et al. (p. 393) show that between periods of instrumental thought and goal-directed behavior, the mind exhibits tonic activity in a network of cortical regions. This so-called default network contributes to the production of stimulus-independent thought and the subjective experience of mind-wandering.

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Here's a link to an interview with Professor Mason which appeared in the January 18, 2007 Washington Post.

The video at the top is a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan of a human brain; this imaging technology was used in the experimental work described above.