Daydreaming?
Have you ever wondered what's going on in your brain when you catch yourself daydreaming?
So many times in life, especially in our student life, listening to a topic we are least interested in, or on a train or flight, our mind wanders off... Teachers used to call it as, “Physically you are here, mentally you are someplace else… Get back!”
“It is useless” they say. “Stop daydreaming and act, act act”, they say. But is daydreaming really as futile as it is made up to be?
A Harvard Medical School research says NO!
At Harvard Medical School, N.D. Nguyen, Amsalem Oren, Andrew Lutas et al Published a fascinating study titled “Cortical reactivations predict future sensory responses” in?Nature?(2023). It studies the brains of mice to understand daydreaming and offers unprecedented glimpses into the brains of mice during these seemingly idle moments.
What did they find?
Scientists observed mice looking at these strange pictures and then watched how their brains behaved. They also checked their brains when they were just awake and not doing anything specific, ‘just chilling’ in a way.
The study found that during this quiet time, it seemed like the mice were daydreaming about the picture they had seen earlier. Interestingly, the way their brains daydreamed in the beginning could predict how their brain activity would change later on. In simpler terms, the study hints that daydreaming might actually be a way our brains improve learning and memory over time. It suggests that our daydreams could influence how our brains react to things we see in the future.
The study looked at how neurons (the brain's messengers) in mice's visual cortex (the part that processes what we see) behaved during quiet moments when the mice were “just chilling”. Surprisingly, the neurons fired in patterns similar to when the mice were actively looking at an image. This suggested that, during daydreams, the mice were replaying those images in their heads.
The researchers found that these daydreams happened more when the mice were relaxed, and they even predicted how the mice's brains would respond to the images later on…
领英推荐
And we drift, we drift, we driffffffft! (Warning: Neurological jargon scattered herein)
The study noticed something more fascinating in mice brains: the way they think about images changes over time, and it's not random. Instead of memories staying the same, the researchers noticed a "drift" in how the brain responded to the same image over time. This shift, called "representational drift," means that the patterns related to images become more and more different from each other.
The mouse's early daydreams about an image could predict how its brain would respond when it actually looked at the image later on. This drifting in response to the same image wasn't just happening by chance—it was like the brain was actively steering in a certain direction during daydreams.
What's even cooler is that during these daydreams, different parts of the mouse's brain were talking to each other. It's like the visual cortex (the image-thinking part) and the hippocampus (the memory part) were having a conversation.
Researchers think that these daydreams might be a big player in brain plasticity, which is like the brain's way of adapting to new experiences. When mice saw two different images a lot, daydreaming seemed to help their brains tell the images apart. It's as if daydreams guide the brain to create unique patterns for each image.
These findings connect with other studies showing that quiet moments after an experience can actually boost learning and memory. It seems like letting the mind wander during daydreams might be a key ingredient for a smart and adaptable brain!
What Does This Mean for Us?
Even though the study was done with mice, the researchers believe there's a similar thing happening in our human brains during daydreams. So, what can we take from this?
Next time you catch yourself daydreaming, know that you're not just lost in thought—you might be actively crafting your brain's brilliant future. So, dream on!