(I'm a) Daydream Believer

The other day, a colleague of mine gave me grief--good-naturedly of course--as he walked by my cubicle, where I was sitting back in my chair, feet on the desk, gazing off into space. I realized then that my common approach to problem solving, something I fondly call "canoodling," might look like a waste of time to onlookers. In past columns I've written about the power of storytelling to help escape narrow mindsets and reduce innovation blindness by envisioning the world from different points of view. It turns out our understanding of the world is based on an inner narrative, one that is constructed in our unconscious from bits of data we may never become consciously aware of. That inner narrative is only accessible when we are not paying attention--when we're daydreaming, freeing our mind from external focus so that it can process data and fit it into those internal narratives. As I transition from the academic world into the corporate world, I have come to realize that thinking time is at a premium, often shoehorned in between meetings. And the corporate world doesn't value apparent inactivity, as my colleague jokingly pointed out. But maybe we should. Thus began my quest to better understand the value of canoodling, particularly in a problem-solving or future-casting activity. What, I asked, is valuable about letting your mind wander? What I found is quite interesting. There are actually physical and cognitive benefits to mind wandering, or what we might more commonly refer to as daydreaming. To the onlooker, daydreaming looks like unproductive downtime. This is far from true, however. Our brain cells obviously communicate when our minds are engaged, but perhaps surprisingly, brain cells are still firing even when the mind is idle. Neuroscientist Marcus Raichle, who studies brain activity, found that when we daydream, we are using 80-95 percent of our brain power, even though we are not concentrating on a focused topic. In fMRI studies monitoring changes in blood flow in the brain as an indicator of cognitive activity, Raichle and his colleagues noticed that the same regions of the brain lit up whenever subjects were not involved in task-directed thought and that these regions constituted a network linking the various parts of the brain used for memory, reflection and consciousness, and emotions. This default mode network, as Raichle calls it, is active when we are staring into space, as well as when we are falling asleep or waking up (Raichle et al. 2001). This helps explain another thing I've noticed about myself and my problem-solving approach: it's not unusual for me to wake up with a fully formed idea to address a problem I've been struggling to solve. In effect, when it is in default mode, the brain is sifting through the data that has been collected throughout the day's activities but not consciously recognized or organized, largely because of the overwhelming stream of information we automatically collect everywhere we go. According to Brafman and Pollack (2013, p. 94), about 10 billion bits of visual information hit our retinas every second. Only about 6 million make it through to the optic nerve and only about 100,000 bits make it all the way to the visual cortex. Stunningly, only about 100 bits actually make it to our conscious minds. We process these 100 bits that actually make it into our conscious mind in a very particular way, according to Brafman and Pollack (2013): "Most of what we know and understand about the world comes from internal processing" (p. 95). In other words, we don't build understanding directly from these bits as they come to us. Rather, we compare them to our memories and experiences and then use our imagination to fill in the gaps in the data. This process creates a constantly changing internal narrative that evolves as we take in information. Default mode activity gathers up all that data and weaves it together, allowing us to recognize often non-obvious patterns--and producing those midnight and early-morning epiphanies. …