Daydreaming is one of life’s great joys. You can indulge in it when you’re stuck in a boring meeting or a long queue.
This seemingly innocuous pastime, however, is a double-edged sword. Some research has found that it boosts creativity, but other studies suggest that it is bad for your mental health and could lower your intelligence.
Daydreaming is a short-term detachment from one’s immediate surroundings, during which a person’s contact with reality is blurred and partially substituted by a visionary fantasy, especially one of happy, pleasant thoughts, hopes or ambitions, imagined as coming to pass, and experienced while awake.
Science Says You’re Probably Super Smart
“People tend to think of mind wandering as something that is bad. some people think it’s spiritual to be absent minded, fear not science says you’re probably smart
The researchers’ first observation: high measured intelligence and creativity went together with high levels of self-reported mind wandering. Not only do frequent daydreamers do better on IQ tests, they also have brains that appear more efficient in brain scans.
This combo of data led the researchers to conclude that a lot of mind wandering isn’t about a failure to pay attention; it’s simply that smart people often need to pay less attention to get the gist of what’s happening around them, leaving plenty of mental capacity to plan a beach vacation or dream up a new business idea.
Other Studies Says It Wrong
Other studies have found that daydreaming is associated with poorer performance on tests of general intelligence and memory capacity.
One of the downsides to daydreaming is that it can get in the way of learning. When people daydream during reading tests, they tend to perform poorly in subsequent comprehension tests. If attention is diverted away from words on the page and directed to the content of the daydream, retrieving information can be seriously affected.
Not only can daydreaming mess up your chances of doing well in exams, it can also mess with your mental health.
daydreamers what do you think???, would give up your visionary fantasy for a good performance on general intelligence or stick with daydreaming as boost in creativity.
