Research Hit: Your Brain on Daydreaming

Andy Hab
3 min readDec 9, 2024

New research identifies the brain patterns of day dreaming

First published on my Substack: https://leadingbrainsreview.substack.com/

Oh, now this is interesting, I’m very good at drifting off task and daydreaming!

Me too, in fact, I consider it one of my core competencies!

Isn’t it true that daydreamers are more creative?

Well, as far as I know, research does point to connections between mind wandering and novel idea generation. But that wasn’t the focus of this research I would like to report on today.

A shame — what was the focus?

The focus of Takamitsu Iwata et al. of the University of Osaka in Japan was to identify patterns in the brain while mind wandering, daydreaming that is.

And what did they find?

They did indeed find a clear patten. But maybe not what we might expect.

This was another study (I have reported on others previously) that investigated human beings who had had their brains surgically wired up to measure activity at different points deep in the brain with implanted electrodes. These patients were awaiting surgery for epilepsy and during this period of monitoring, to try to identify the cause…

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Andy Hab
Andy Hab

Written by Andy Hab

Sharing fascinating, fun, and important knowledge on the brain and human behaviour - most days. And masters track athlete - still going strong!

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