Research Hit: Your Brain on Daydreaming
New research identifies the brain patterns of day dreaming
Oh, now this is interesting, I’m very good at drifting off task and daydreaming!
Me too, in fact, I consider it one of my core competencies!
Isn’t it true that daydreamers are more creative?
Well, as far as I know, research does point to connections between mind wandering and novel idea generation. But that wasn’t the focus of this research I would like to report on today.
A shame - what was the focus?
The focus of Takamitsu Iwata et al. of the University of Osaka in Japan was to identify patterns in the brain while mind wandering, daydreaming that is.
And what did they find?
They did indeed find a clear patten. But maybe not what we might expect.
This was another study (I have reported on others previously) that investigated human beings who had had their brains surgically wired up to measure activity at different points deep in the brain with implanted electrodes. These patients were awaiting surgery for epilepsy and during this period of monitoring, to try to identify the cause of their epilepsy, their brain could be monitored in ways we can’t do with human beings in normal life.
They were monitored for 10 days and each hour while they were awake they answered questions on what they were thinking about.
And?
And a pattern emerged known as sharp wave ripples.
What?
Yes, it may mean nothing but this describes ripples of highly synchronised activity that also occur during sleep. They have also been observed in waking states but this is the first time that they have been directly associated with daydreaming.
In these cases they were generated from the hippocampus, which, as you may know, is associated with memory and recall. This suggests that the brain is coordinating various recall mechanisms - which in this case suggests imagining. The intensity of the activity was correlated with the vividness of the daydream.
Oh, that is interesting - so coordinated brain patterns generated from your memory centres are the cause of daydreams?
Yes, that appears to be the case. It was only in a group of 10 and they were epilepsy patients but this was taken into account when interpreting the data.
And how will that help my daydreaming?
Unfortunately for you, and me, this does not point to interventions. It is merely descriptive. Your brain and my brain seem to be pretty good at spontaneously, and regularly, creating sharp wave ripple patterns. Kind of nice to know.
However, researchers may then be able to find interventions for this.
In case we want an intervention!
Indeed, as there are also some benefits to daydreaming also.
Happy daydreams, then!
Yes, happy sharp wave ripples!
Reference
Takamitsu Iwata, Takufumi Yanagisawa, Yuji Ikegaya, et al.
Hippocampal sharp-wave ripples correlate with periods of naturally occurring self-generated thoughts in humans.
Nature Communications, 2024; 15 (1)
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-48367-1