Daydreamers might solve problems faster | Hacker News Reader

Daydreamers might solve problems faster

news.theage.com.au

31 pointsnreece19 comments

"People assume that when the mind wanders away it just gets turned off"

Who assumed this? It seems like a pretty stupid assumption from a cognitive standpoint. Daydreaming is basically an activity where the brain has to create a whole scenario without the benefit of any outside stimulus what so ever which sounds fairly hard to me.

I was a day dreamer when I was a kid and my Mom never assumed I was stupid. The only problem with daydreaming is when you do it instead of applying yourself to the task at hand which makes this study a bit irrelevant imho.

I think the question is whether your brain is working on problems that aren't part of your daydream. In other words, if I'm daydreaming about Isabella Rossellini dressed up as a starfish, am I also figuring out how to improve problematic code at the same time?

" ... f I'm daydreaming about Isabella Rossellini dressed up as a starfish, ..."

Have you seen the movie "Infected"? If not, you may find it, um, interesting.

I've always considered myself one of the biggest daydreamers I know. Most of my time in class is spent daydreaming, and it's definitely served as my biggest source of creativity. Many of the ideas I come up with are usually a product of my incessant daydreaming. Sure, a lot of the times it's me carving through the hills of Italy in my Aston Martin, but when it's not, daydreaming is my problem solving time. I start on an issue, ride down its tangent line, hop onto another node, etc., until I land on something of value. I'm not sure if imagination/creativity leads to more daydreaming, or whether more daydreaming leads to the development of imagination/creativity, but they definitely play off each other and allow the brain to wander and bend in amazing ways - ways people who are too focused never get to experience, I think.

It can get to an extreme, though. Often times I find myself daydreaming too much to where it borders laziness, and ultimately me not executing most of those ideas.

My technique for designing software architecture is basically to daydream what it would be like to use the best possible API for the problem, then further daydream about what problems might result. It takes a bit of discipline, but with years of practice it turns out to work pretty well. You never get good enough to never get blindsided by some requirement, but you can cut it down a lot.

Don't skip that problem step; all architectures have tradeoffs and if you can't name the bad things about your choices you don't understand the choices yet.

Argh, another brain imaging study proving nothing.

What any of these fMRI studies measure is energy consumption of brain structures. Energy consumption != useful thinking. Their conclusion is exactly like saying: my screensaver causes my CPU to get warm, therefore it is doing useful computation.

While I enjoy hating on fMRI studies as much as the next guy, it's a little harsh to say that this study proves nothing. Brain activity is proportional to blood flow/energy consumption. We can argue about the linearity of that relationship, the spatial and temporal resolution, the problems of averaging to increase signal-to-noise and other interpretational issues, but it is still a proxy for neuronal activity.

To use your analogy, I'd say it's more like looking at the spatial distribution of temperature in your CPU. Even if it's just driving the screensaver, at least now you know something about which registers are involved. Likewise, the authors in this study have implicated a couple of areas as being involved in the process of daydreaming.

Where I would criticize this study, is the part where they conclude that there is a connection between daydreaming and problem solving on the basis that executive function areas are active during daydreaming. It's a suggestive link, but very tenuous.

I hope research along these lines helps clarify the folk wisdom about subconscious cognition. Everybody "knows" that if you need to hoover up existing knowledge, you should focus intensely and block everything else out. To learn an existing system or API, set yourself up with a long, focused coding session. If you're stuck on a problem that needs to be solved or a false understanding that needs to be corrected, do something relaxing and unrelated.

It's not clear exactly what you should do to enable that subconscious process. This study suggests that daydreaming works. Is high-pressure, focused thinking okay if it doesn't have anything to do with the problem you need to solve? What about competitive sports? What about the mentally quiet yet highly attuned state achieved during endurance exercise? Does caffeine help or hurt? So many questions.

Sometimes I worry that I don't daydream any more. Instead I just hit some websites, like this one.

I avoid listening to music and other things while I am traveling - I find that when I have plenty of time to think and daydream I come up with more ideas and solutions.

It's too bad that HN takes up some of my idea time, though thankfully I learn enough while here to make up for it.

Apparently, I'm working on something like a madman all day. Wish I knew what it was...

whilst I am a daydreamer, I am not sure I could daydream when stuck in an MRI scanner

It's not as hard as you might think. Sure, it's loud and cramped, but it's really freakin' dull in one of those things! I daydreamed just fine. I even know someone who fell asleep during an MRI.

I bow to experience... may I cheekily ask how you managed daydreaming with the other probes attached/inserted? I find even whistling difficult. ;)

Heh, it was only my brain they were interested in.

"I even know someone who fell asleep during an MRI."

i did! it was almost like binaural beats in a meditating fashion coming from speakers. I stressd hard to take my mind away from the feeling of claustraphopia...and dozed off!

yep I've had quite a few MRI scans and I doze off every time. I usually come out feeling very relaxed and refreshed.

I managed to when stuck in a classroom.

Apparently, that doesn't include the daydreaming one might be doing while teaching is going on though.

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