Ode to positive constructive daydreaming

Abstract

Nearly 60 years ago, Jerome L. Singer launched a groundbreaking research program into daydreaming (Singer, 1955, 1975, 2009) that presaged and laid the foundation for virtually every major strand of mind wandering research active today (Antrobus, 1999; Klinger, 1999, 2009). Here we review Singer’s enormous contribution to the field, which includes insights, methodologies, and tools still in use today, and trace his enduring legacy as revealed in the recent proliferation of mind wandering studies. We then turn to the central theme in Singer’s work, the adaptive nature of positive constructive daydreaming, which was a revolutionary idea when Singer began his work in the 1950s and remains underreported today. Last, we propose a new approach to answering the enduring question: Why does mind wandering persist and occupy so much of our time, as much as 50% of our waking time according to some estimates, if it is as costly as most studies suggest?

A combined experimental and individual-differences investigation into mind wandering during a video lecture.

“…However, given that adults spend 25-50% of their waking time mind wandering (Kane et al, 2007;Killingsworth & Gilbert, 2010;Song & Wang, 2012), it might sometimes be adaptive. Indeed, Singer's pioneering work claimed that "positive-constructive daydreaming" contributed to everyday problem solving, creativity, and imagination (Singer, 1966;McMillan, Kaufman, & Singer, 2013). Similarly, Klinger's investigations of "fantasy" emphasized the role of mind-wandering in goal striving (Klinger, 1971(Klinger, , 2013.…”

Schooled in our own minds: Mind wandering and mindfulness in the makings of the curriculum

“…While some like McMillan et al (2013) proposed mind-wandering as possibly a deliberate process of which one is aware, following Smallwood, McSpadden and Schooler (2007), here it is suggested that when one is 14 wandering, one is unaware of the process of wandering, nor does he or she choose to engage in it. Rather, only when one finds herself wandering, awareness is there to acknowledge having been wandering.…”

“…Second, what we are suggesting is that our lacking a sense of agency over processes and/or content that comes to our minds spontaneously, does not rule out the possibility that there is perhaps a natural intelligence or evolutionary 'reasoning' behind these non-deliberate processes and content, of which we are unaware. Such indeed has been the position of some scholars in this field (Baars, 2010;McMillan et al, 2013;Raichle, 2015 an adaptive process that may be beneficial. This approach will enable us to present some theories that have been proposed in cognitive and neuroscience in educational terms, and later, to suggest some critical responses to these theories.…”

“…On the one hand, mind-wandering has been suggested to be a remarkable evolutionary achievement involving the maintenance of information for interpreting, responding to, and even predicting environmental demands, an achievement that allows people to learn, reason, plan (Schacter, Addis, & Buckner, 2007;Raichle, 2015), and build mental models (Sood & Jones, 2013). Some studies have thus been leaning toward presenting it as an adaptive, positive, and even desirable phenomenon (Baars, 2010;McMillan, Kaufman & Singer, 2013;Smallwood & Andrews-Hanna, 2013). On the other hand, much of the research shows that we pay an emotional cost for the tendency of our minds to wander.…”

“…Some, however, have challenged the term 'mind-wandering' itself. The above review followed this term given its pervasiveness in the literature but various other terms have been applied to describe the broad domain discussed here including, day-dreaming, rumination, and task-irrelevant/self-generated/spontaneous thinking (Christoff et al, 2016;Mcmillan et al, 2013;Smallwood & Schooler, 2014). Scholars have argued that these terms are not identical, hence there's a need for far more nuance in this domain (Baars, 2010;Christoff, 2012).…”