Hacker News Reader

Yes, it's called day dreaming :-)

This corroborates the theory that long periods of doing nothing help to develop creativity. (Day dreaming makes you smarter; meditation makes you well.)

It probably works exactly the way you'd think. When you read books, are they mostly lists of specific facts (e.g. programming books) or books that are insightful? When you're not really doing anything, is your brain just processing the environment or reliving past experiences, or are you looking for patterns and connections?

Or maybe that's how the "system idle process" naturally looks like - and as soon as mind is focused, all connections get clustered together.