Daydreaming is gaining recognition as something more than a vice, evolving into a virtue as scientists delve deeper into this intriguing phenomenon.
Harvard University researchers have discovered initial indications suggesting that when mice engage in ‘daydreaming’ or reflective moments about something they witnessed earlier in the day, their brains undergo a beneficial rewiring process that enhances memory and learning.
While this hypothesis requires additional testing in subsequent experiments, it appears that mice, when presented with a black-and-white checkered pattern, can mentally retain and visualize the image even after it is no longer visible.
The ‘daydream’ phenomenon, characterized by the visual cortex actively visualizing an absent image, manifested only when the mouse was in an unstimulated, calm, and relaxed state with constricted pupils.
Researchers at Harvard believe that this unstimulated, dream-like state in mice could potentially have a comparable impact on sleep, enhancing memory consolidation and facilitating learning.
“We wanted to know how this daydreaming process occurred on a neurobiological level, and whether these moments of quiet reflection could be important for learning and memory,” explains neurobiologist Nghia Nguyen from Harvard University.
In the research, 13 mice were exposed to two distinct black-and-white images 64 times during the day, each displayed for two seconds, within an environment that lacked additional stimuli.
Over multiple days, the researchers at Harvard conducted these experiments repeatedly, closely observing the electrical activity of 7,000 neurons in the brains of eight mice. This observation encompassed nerve cells in the visual cortex and hippocampus, a region intricately linked to memory consolidation.
Eventually, each of the two images induced a distinct pattern of neural activity in the lateral visual cortex of the mice.
This brain region is linked to recognizing objects and distinguishing the characteristics of shapes.
The results indicate that the mouse brain is storing each image with a distinct pattern of neural activity.
However, what adds to the intrigue is that once these images were replaced with a blank computer screen, the mouse visual cortex occasionally ‘reactivated,’ stimulating a comparable pattern of neurons as the removed image.
This brief reactivation in the visual cortex often coincided with sharp-wave ripples in the hippocampus – indicating that the brain was effectively encoding visual information despite the absence of a stimulus.
With time, the brain activity upon viewing an image began to resemble the brain activity during daydreaming about that image.
This indicates that daydreaming was fortifying certain neuronal connections while diminishing others, fostering a more efficient stimulus response overall.
“When you see two different images many times, it becomes important to discriminate between them,” explains Nguyen.
“Our findings suggest that daydreaming may guide this process by steering the neural patterns associated with the two images away from each other.”
The results imply that in moments of low stimulation, the brain can wander into an imaginary realm, where mental images play a role in actively reshaping the brain’s future responses to stimuli.
Whether this phenomenon extends to human brains remains uncertain, but past studies have indicated that prompting individuals to recollect an image does enhance brain activity in their visual cortex and hippocampus, as demonstrated in previous research and studies.
Additional research has indicated that individuals who engage in more daydreaming exhibit improved memory recall abilities, especially in distracting environments.
“We feel pretty confident that if you never give yourself any awake downtime, you’re not going to have as many of these daydream events, which may be important for brain plasticity,” argues neurobiologist Mark Andermann from Harvard.
Similar to many factors influencing human health, excessive indulgence in daydreaming, or daydreaming about inappropriate subjects, may have adverse effects on cognitive functions such as attention and short-term memory, according to some experts.
Considering that daydreaming is an activity that could occupy up to half of our waking hours, it’s remarkable how little we understand about our contemplative minds.
The research findings were released in Nature.
