Drifting off in a meeting usually earns a nudge, not a compliment. But a Georgia Institute of Technology study found that adults who said their minds wandered more often in daily life scored higher on two kinds of tests: one measuring fluid intelligence and one measuring creativity.
The researchers scanned the brains of 112 adults and published the results in the journal Neuropsychologia. “Some people have more efficient brains,” co-author Eric Schumacher said, according to Futurity’s write-up of the Georgia Tech study.
What the Georgia Tech Team Measured
Each volunteer lay in an MRI machine for five minutes, staring at a fixed point while the scanner recorded which brain regions were working together at rest. Each one also filled out a short questionnaire about how often their minds wandered in everyday life. Habits like this tend to say a lot, as the site found in its look at traits shared by people who are always late, and plenty of chronic daydreamers will also recognize themselves in these tips on how to stop procrastinating.
The paper, titled “Functional connectivity within and between intrinsic brain networks correlates with trait mind wandering,” lists Christine Godwin of Georgia Tech as first author and Schumacher as senior author, with colleagues from the University of New Mexico and elsewhere. Its abstract on PubMed says participants also completed measures of executive function, fluid intelligence and creativity.
The study was published in August 2017. It is not new, but it remains one of the clearest looks at how everyday daydreaming lines up with test scores.
The 2 Tests Where Daydreamers Did Better
The researchers found significant positive correlations between how much people said they daydreamed and their scores on two specific tests. The first was Raven’s, a classic test of fluid intelligence, the ability to reason through new problems. The second was the Remote Associates Task, a creativity test that asks people to find the word linking three seemingly unrelated words.
The third measure, executive function, did not show up among the positive links in the abstract. So the result is about reasoning and creativity, not about every kind of mental skill.
The brain scans told a matching story. Self-described daydreamers showed more connectivity within the brain’s default mode network at rest, and more connectivity between that network and the frontoparietal control network, as ScienceAlert reported, noting the sample of 112 participants.
Why Researchers Think It Happens
Schumacher’s explanation is that a more efficient brain has spare capacity. “People with efficient brains may have too much brain capacity to stop their minds from wandering,” he said. In other words, a mind that handles a dull task easily has room left over to drift.
Godwin added a caution: “There are important individual differences to consider as well, such as a person’s motivation or intent to stay focused on a particular task.”
The idea fits with other findings that sharp minds do not always look busy, a theme in the site’s roundup of habits of highly intelligent people when they are alone.
The Fine Print on Daydreaming
A wandering mind is not always a gift. The study is a correlation in 112 adults, which ScienceAlert called a fairly small sample, and the researchers said more work is needed to sort out when mind wandering helps and when it gets in the way.
Earlier research points the other way in some settings. A study that created the Mind-Wandering Questionnaire, a five-item scale, found that mind-wandering during testing was linked to worse reading comprehension in middle and high school students. And a widely cited 2010 Harvard study in Science, which sampled people’s thoughts through a smartphone app, found that people were thinking about something other than what they were doing almost as often as not, and that doing so typically made them less happy.
The takeaway is a balanced one: daydreaming is not automatically a flaw, and in the Georgia Tech sample it traveled with stronger reasoning and creativity scores. For anyone who does their best thinking while staring out a window, a little work-life balance and a room that sparks ideas, like these room ideas to spark creativity, may be the right setting. More everyday clues show up in the site’s list of habits linked to intellectual ability that have nothing to do with a degree.
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This article was produced with AI assistance and edited for accuracy against the sources linked above.
Image: James Emery – CC BY 2.0/Wikimedia Commons
