Daytime mind wandering is linked to dream content while asleep, study finds

We do not simply rewind the video of the day’s recorded experience and relive it at night, projected on the big screen of our cortex. If there is such a thing as “day residue,” there are but a few drops of the stuff in our otherwise arid dreams. But Stickgold did find a strong and predictive daytime signal in the static of nighttime dream reports:

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In the one study examining REM, unlike both waking and NREM, there appeared a lack of connectivity between the dorsomedial prefrontal subsystem and the posterior central node of the default network in the pCC (Koike et al., 2011). Koike et al. speculate that this disconnection contributes to the illogic and bizarreness of dream cognition, as has al

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Research on this has been done, as well. In a study titled, “Where the Eyes Wander: The Relationship Between Mind Wandering and Fixation Allocation to Visually Salient and Semantically Informative Static Scene Content,” a group of scientists attempted to observe how the mind orders and prioritizes visible information and how conscious we are of tha

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Our default waking mode (and also during dreaming phases of sleep) is not a brain at rest, but what is known as mind wandering.

the dreaming brain was not simply recapitulating or re-creating exactly what happened to them in the maze. Rather, the dream algorithm was cherry-picking salient fragments of the prior learning experience, and then attempting to place those new experiences within the back catalog of preexisting knowledge. Like an insightful interviewer, dreaming ta

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our minds are wired to wander. Wandering is their default. Whenever our thoughts are suspended between specific, discrete, goal-directed activities, the brain reverts to a so-called baseline, “resting” state—but don’t let the word fool you, because the brain isn’t at rest at all. Instead, it experiences tonic activity in what’s now known as the DMN

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I think it is more helpful to talk about the underlying processes: spontaneous thought, or the decoupling of attention from perception, which is what happens when our thoughts separate from our perception of the environment. Both these processes take place during mind-wandering and daydreaming.

Envisioning or planning one’s future, projecting oneself into a situation (especially a social situation), feeling empathy, invoking autobiographical memories also involve this daydreaming or mind-wandering network. If you’ve ever stopped what you were doing to picture the consequence of some future action or to imagine yourself in a particular fut

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