Why we daydream and what goes on in our brain when we do - CrowdScience podcast, BBC World Service

Okay, I'm Kayla Tarnowski, I, uh, sorry. . .

Hi everyone. My name is Taylor Dickinson but  you might know me better as Femini. .

. I'm Sayma and I'm a maladaptive daydreamer. Oh also I'm a maladaptive daydreamer, that's why I'm here.

I daydream every day and it could from like  five minutes to five hours. If I'm like hours in the day, I'd spent a good 20 hours in it. My daydreaming is rocking back and forth in my bed for hours at a time.

I started around 11 years old and I'm 24 now. I always felt like there was something different about me like I never fit in. I've never really told my family about it.

No one knows. Because I'm worried about their reaction. I basically have like a whole different like fantasy world in my head.

You can escape reality. It might sound sad but I don't think like I'll ever be happy or like content with my life. On some level  I am ashamed of it.

Just because I compare it to my own like fantasy world. Probably because it's  not a normal thing. The more you daydream, the like worse you feel about living in the real  world.

I can stop it but I don't necessarily want to because I don't know a life without it. You're listening to CrowdScience from the BBC World Service. I'm Alex Lathbridge and this week we're wandering into the world of daydreams.

No that isn't a way of saying that we got distracted  and didn't make a show. Let's look at where it all began, us putting a listener in front of an expert.  Elkin hi, how are you?

I'm doing great. DrGuilia Poerio isn’t someone I outsourced my interviewing to, she’s a lecturer in psychology at Sussex University in the UK, whose  research explores the links between daydreaming and emotion. The reason she's talking to Elkin is  because he wrote into CrowdScience from New York with a question that we just couldn't get out  of our heads.

As a result we put their two heads together. It's all thanks to a situation that  most of us have been in. So what's on your mind?

I was not in a good mood a couple of months  ago, I was dating someone very briefly and then I was stuck thinking about that person for a long  time but this is not happening to me just now I'm thinking constantly about things that are not  related to the thing that I'm doing right now, why is that happening and how could I just get rid of  it? That's such a good question. What proportion of time would you say that you're spending doing that? 

Yeah so I'm not daydreaming as much as I did, daydreaming for me now happens probably I don't  know it feels like 30% of the time, when in the past it felt like 90% of the time. Okay so would  you say that typically when you're daydreaming you're thinking about past interactions or you're  thinking about a problem and trying to solve it you know what's the kind of typical content? I  remember in another quasi-relationship I was thinking about someone a lot and I kept on  remembering things and I was just stuck in the past and just thinking 'Oh what could have happened  if I did this or that or whatever?

' and what I learned from that time is that it is not helpful  to just get stuck in the past, not at all, I don't think about it but I cannot do the same thing for  the future, I will ruminate about the future a lot. Simply put, Elkin wants to know why he daydreams  so much and how to reduce it, so where did you even begin with this? All right, if we're going to figure  out how our brains make up imaginary scenes one moment before harassing us on the bus with what  you need to get from the shops the next, a good starting point I think would be to get ourselves  a definition.

What actually is daydreaming? Okay so you think that's a basic question but it's  actually quite complicated and it's not something that necessarily people agree on and what people  think daydreaming is from like kind of dictionary definitions is not necessarily what we would call  daydreaming in the scientific world, so we would define daydreaming as meeting kind of two criteria. The first is task unrelated thought, so your thinking has to be unrelated to whatever  task it is that you're doing in the current moment and it also has to be stimulus independent  thought, so stimulus independent thought means that your thought isn't to do with whatever is going  on in the external environment.

So often people call daydreaming or mind wandering task unrelated  and stimulus independent thought, which is a bit of a mouthful. All right let me rack my brain for  something simpler. Intrusive thoughts.

Daydreaming. Mind wandering. Spontaneous arising of a thought.

Oh thanks brain. Yes those, there are plenty of names for it but all of them describe roughly the same thing: Thoughts that have nothing to do with the task or place at hand. Yeah so what Elkin was describing  often was thoughts that were kind of intruding and preventing him from kind of doing whatever task  he was doing and also about something like his ex-partner is not about whatever is going  on in the immediate environment for him so that would count as daydreaming or mind wandering  according to most definitions and I think he classifies it as that as well.

So is daydreaming normal? Yeah I mean it's totally normal to engage in thought that isn't related to the here and now  you know it's actually probably very adaptive so imagine what would happen if you couldn't ever  escape mentally from what's going on right in front of you, you wouldn't be able to kind of  think about what you're going to do next week, next year, you wouldn't be able to reflect  on past experiences, you'd be very much focused on the present and that's not actually very helpful as a species. So Elkin says he spends about 30% of his time daydreaming.

Yes so I would say that  that is actually very typical, so if you look at daydreaming or mind wandering rates in the  laboratory it's usually about 30% of the time and if you go into daily life and you kind  of sample people's experiences as they're going about their lives they will be mind wandering  between 30 and 50% of the time across a range of activities. Hypothetically speaking, how would  you test that? So hypothetically speaking what we would do is get people to sign up to an  app and they would get prompted at random times during their working hours and we'd go 'What are you thinking about, what you thinking about, what are you thinking about, what are you thinking about?

' So  of course I did it. I had to answer some questions on my phone at random points during the day  whenever it lit up with a notification from Guilia. Now I've got to say I've faced a lot in the  name of CrowdScience.

I've had machines try to read my mind. I've almost been run over by a horse.  I've even been exposed to prehistoric viruses.

Let me tell you none of that compares to how painful  Guilia's experiment was and I can prove it because I kept an audio diary: I'm waiting to get the  train, missed my train, I've just woken up, trying to chase the cat, where you going mate come back  here, trying to make lunch, I'm brushing my teeth, I'm trying to brush my teeth, you  don't want to know what I was doing. After seven days of torment Guilia had collected all of the data she needed but what insights did it actually give her into my thoughts? We only caught you mind wondering 19% of the time and there are some interesting things to note about what you said.

Oh this is  really good because I don't remember answering a lot of these. So we asked you about the time  orientation of your thinking. This is because what we often see is what we call a prospective  bias in mind wandering, in which people tend to think more about the future than about the past  and the idea with that is that by thinking about the future that's more adaptive because the future  is still to come and you can help prepare for it etc.

It's mostly 'when is this experiment going to  stop? ' Yes so you were thinking about the future 13% of the time, the past 2% of the  time, the present 2% of the time and then 6% of your thoughts had no time orientation. So  you're showing this kind of classic prospective bias in thinking.

So that's normal? That's typical,  yes and of your kind of your general thoughts 15% were positive with only 2% negative and 6%  neutral, so you tend to think a lot about positive things. Does this reflect your actual experience? 

Despite my complaining I'm actually statistically speaking a very positive person. Hmm let me think. .

.  We now know that if left alone our minds will tend to jump ahead to the future, attempting to  help us navigate what's to come but how are our daydreams created? Is it me, is it not me, where is  the line, are we in control of our own daydreaming?

Well I'm hoping DrKalina Christoff, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia in Canada, can probe into it. She  knows better than anyone that our understanding of intrusive thoughts and daydreams is novel right at  the cutting edge of modern research. Something that happened right around the 2000s was that suddenly people in the neuroimaging field realised that what was going on in the brain when there were no  tasks in the scanner was a lot more active, a lot more rich and a lot more interesting in a way than  what was happening in our subject's brains when we were asking them to do something that we thought  would be interesting.

Okay and so why is it more rich and more interesting, what's going on?  Yeah so the first thing we discovered was that it was more rich because it led to more widespread  activations throughout the brain but then what we've been doing in the last 15 to 20 years is  trying to understand what is going on with these activations, what do they correspond to in our  minds? One of the big concepts that came up was that of the default network activations but very  quickly people started realising that all these parts of the brain that were active during that  "default thinking" were also the same parts of the brain that were known to be active  during memory tasks and then a couple of years later people started discovering that they're  also activated when people are imagining the future.

Let's take a step back here, which  parts of the brain are activating when you're talking about that background mode, like what can  we see? Yes so if you imagine the brain being like two halves of a walnut, a very big walnut, in the  middle of that walnut are parts of the brain that we call the medial - the midline parts -  and then that is what ended up being termed the default network. When our thoughts wander, when  we have daydreams, when we have thoughts that we don't expect or perhaps don't want to have,  what's actually happening in the brain?

One of the things we've found relatively recently is that there seems to be a sequence with which these regions are activated so they're not just coming  online all at the same time but when a spontaneous thought arises it seems to begin from one of the  core structures of the medial temporal lobe, the hippocampus and then spread through the cortical  activations kind of upwards through these midline structures until we experience them as a thought  so we found that from a study in the fMRI scanner where we brought highly experienced meditators  so people who had had meditation experience for something like two or three decades and we asked  them to just press a button for us whenever they detected the spontaneous arising of a thought so  we knew the moment when they had the conscious experience of having a thought come to them  and what we see then in that study is that the hippocampus becomes active something like  three seconds before they even become consciously aware. You say three seconds and three seconds doesn't  sound like very long but if I pause right now. .

. that was three seconds, that's a really long time.  Did that surprise you?

That hugely surprised me because what feels like three seconds for us  in our conscious experience is one thing but what is actually three seconds in terms of  neurotransmission terms is almost an eternity. The hippocampus could potentially transmit something to the cortex in 300 milliseconds, so what that tells me is that even though in our subjective experience  the thought arising can feel very immediate and like a final product there's actually a lot of  development that thought underwent in those three seconds before we experienced it. That probably made a difference as to whether the thought felt like something that I have control over or  something that controls me.

What do you think that we can learn from these sorts of experiments?  Often times people are for one reason or another unhappy with what's going on in their minds  so they could be thinking too many negative thoughts or they could be thinking positive  thoughts that are just something that I can disengage from and in those moments being aware  of how much our minds do for us outside of our awareness and outside of our intention is really  important because then we can seek ways to give opportunities for our minds to do things  differently. You're listening to CrowdScience on the.

. . what's  it called.

. . that thing the.

. . the BBC World Service yes them.

I'm Alex Lathbridge and I think I might have  drifted away somewhere. What were we doing? Right listener Elkin wanted to know why he daydreams and we've heard how a spontaneous thought arises in the hypothalamus a mental millennia before  it pops into the forefront of your mind, so for example those positive thoughts that I had  during Guilia's experiment, even after missing my train, were forming in my brain before I knew  they were forming in my brain, so we've got part of the answer there for Elkin.

We daydream because  our brain tells us to but there's something very interesting in what Kalina said about how long these  thoughts are given to form. They take three seconds, now that's an eternity in brain time, being manipulated  and molded into something that we can then feel as an emotion. It's in those three seconds that the  science gets really interesting because some of us find that final thought intrusive but others find  it overwhelmingly gratifying actually making them want to daydream even more, so much so that in some cases they can't escape.

That's the case for Taylor. Hi everyone, my name is Taylor Dickinson but you  might know me better as Femini or however you want to say it on Tik Tok. Oh also I'm a maladaptive daydreamer that's why I'm here.

I was going to say you're like throwing in  your Tik Tok, like why is this person just here in the middle of the show talking about  their Tik Tok. Yeah cuz you're just my biggest fan like he just wanted to talk to me so. .

. Chatting  to Taylor this is the first time that I've ever heard of maladaptive daydreaming so once more I  turned to an expert. Eli Somer is a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Haifa in Israel.

He is the world's foremost expert on the disorder. We know that individuals may spend hours  lost in vivid and very detailed fantasies. This mental behaviour can interfere with daily life,  with work, with relationships because sometimes people prefer to do that as it is apparently  very gratifying.

When was it first identified? 2002, it's more than 20 years ago the term did not  exist on the internet but nowadays I think if you Google maladaptive daydreaming you will  get over 600,000 hits. It's being discussed online a lot.

So from your work do we have an idea  of who usually gets it? Well I would say first of all maladaptive daydreaming is more common  among individuals with anxiety, with depression, so they seem to be looking for some sort of an  escapism, some sort of a distraction, some sort of self-soothing, self-medication to help them deal  with their emotional pain. This reminded me of something that Taylor mentioned to me earlier.

She actually described the imaginary world that she repeatedly visits every single day. It  takes place in a scene from the TV show Hannibal and she's giving evidence in court. So the person  being held on trial - spoiler alert - is the main character Will Graham and I've kind of attached  my character to him in the sense where like I'm usually defending him, so I'll be on the stand  testifying and then everyone listening is just like oh my goodness like she's been through so  much but she's so intelligent and so strong and so I'm basically getting all the validation and attention  and love and relationships that I've never had in my life and I just hate it, I hate it at this  point.

You say there that you hate it but it sort of sounds that you perhaps choose to dream? Yes  so it functions exactly like any other behavioural addiction. I myself am a recovering addict.

I  still deal with a lot of addictions today such as alcohol and marijuana, that's legal in Canada and  I can tell you it is the worst addiction I've had. It's comforting and that's what I think makes it  so dangerous is you can create this own space for yourself, you can escape reality, leave your life  and just cope that way and I think that's very very, very dangerous because that's what drugs  do for people. So Eli, you know listening there.

Taylor likened it sort of to addiction. Now  generally with her description there would you say that all of that is a fair representation  of maladaptive daydreaming? So yeah maladaptive daydreaming has been proposed as a form of  behavioural addiction by some researches because first it is so rewarding, there are also reports of  withdrawal symptoms experienced by people who who try to curb the habit and additionally some  individuals with the maladaptive daydreaming report using other escapist addictive behaviour. 

Many of them report excessive internet use. So it certainly shares typical characteristics of  behavioural addictions but whether or not it should be classified as one or perhaps a dissociative  disorder is a matter of debate currently. Okay so with that in mind and talking about the excess there, I want you to hear how Taylor describes the way that her daydreaming affects her life day to day. 

I have made strides to bring my fantasy world into my reality in healthy ways of course so that  is building a community in real life but that actually created a lot more problems for me because  I was projecting a lot like I'm not going to find that exact daydreamed character in my real life  and I would create these very hyper-dependent, very toxic relationships with people like there was  one instance where I ran away to be with someone where I was sexually, physically, emotionally abused  and I would stay in these relationships with these people because I felt like they actually saw  me, for once in my life someone in my life saw me, understood me like in a lot of these abusive  instances I wasn't daydreaming because all of my focus was on the other person so it became very  toxic in the sense where if I wasn't daydreaming, if I didn't have that addiction I was going  to have another addiction. That's quite a tough listen isn't it? Yes I really, I quite admire her, I mean her willingness to share this very personal information and also her courage  because she tries hard obviously to cope and to minimise her daydreaming.

And so do we  know just how common maladaptive daydreaming is, because you know as Taylor explains it for her  it's incredibly debilitating so I can imagine that if lots of people around the world were suffering  from this you know it would be quite noticeable? Yeah well the prevalence of maladaptive daydreaming is not very well established yet but there are some studies coming out now and among  Israeli students there was a 2. 5% prevalence rate of maladaptive daydreaming.

You know compared  to other disorders, for example let's take a very different, very well established psychiatric  disorder like schizophrenia, its prevalence rate is 1%. This study suggests that it's definitely  not rare and people with maladaptive daydreaming are living among us. What I know from my experience is that they all feel ashamed of this condition.

Many of them feel that they are only people in  the world who have this condition because when they talk about it, when they come to their doctors  and report about it, they're often being dismissed or misdiagnosed because the condition is not  classified yet in any of the psychiatric manuals. When we started looking into Elkin's question 'Why  do we daydream? ' I never expected to find something so relatable to also be so mysterious and powerful. 

I expected an easy answer you know but we can't put daydreaming to bed just yet. There's something  else that Elkin wanted to know: Do researchers have any idea how to help people who might not  have a serious condition but find themselves daydreaming a lot and want to be more positive and  productive? To find out I'm back in the psychology department at Sussex University, this time to meet  with DrSophie Forster.

Her research explores what makes certain people more prone to distraction  than others and for the second time I've become a guinea pig. I have something prepared for you  Alex. Is it a puppy?

It's not but it is something actually in my bag that you might be interested  in. So can I ask you, do you like chocolate? Yes.

Okay so we need this chocolate because I've got a room  set up down there for you to try out an attention experiment that's a recreation of something that  my lab did. There are lots of rooms here, is it just down here on the left hand side? It's just here  on the right.

I thought Guilia forcing me to answer a  short questionnaire multiple times a week was bad but Sophie had something even worse. Don't let my  casual humming here fool you. I had to sit in front of a computer in a small room.

A ring of letters  would pop up on screen and I had to pay very close attention on whether it contained the letter H  or the letter K and then I had a split second to press the corresponding letter on the keyboard. If  I got it wrong, there would be a very annoying buzzing noise like this. No wrong one.

Oh I forgot to  mention I had to do this while a chocolate bar was inches away from my fingers on the desk. So rather  than testing the speed of my reactions, Sophie was actually trying to figure out if I could remain on  task and not get sidetracked by the wonderful aroma that filled the tiny room. Fortunately I'm  built different.

He's just not losing. After 30 minutes I was released and because I'm just so  good at this test remaining on task and getting nearly 100% I got given that chocolate bar. Sorry  that you had to endure that task I know it's not the most exciting way to spend your afternoon.

The  background to this research is that I'm really interested in knowing what we can do to help  people avoid distraction and usually when people try to think about improving people's attention  it's always focused on like the person but I'm more interested in how we can actually change  tasks so that they are more effective and they are more engaging and that's why I was attracted to  this theory of attention - the load theory. There's only a certain amount of information that you can  take in, so we have this fixed capacity of how much sensory information we're going to take in in a  given moment but we always have to take in that amount so we can't take in less we can't take in  more so that means if you're doing a task where there's lots of information to process that will  use up all of your capacity and you won't take in anything else, so you won't be distracted but if  you're doing a task where there's less information because you've got spare capacity you won't be  able to stop other information getting through and then that can distract you. So then when it  comes to our listener Elkin, you know one part of his question was how can he daydream less?

Is the  answer stick him in a small enclosed room and make him press keyboard buttons? It should apply to real world tasks. I think there's definitely more  applied work to be done but some other labs have done applied versions of my studies, so for example  there was a really nice study where they used a driving simulator and they made a kind of version  of that task but with driving so they had a task that was visually easy just driving along an empty  road or that was visually more complex with a lot more traffic and like stuff in the street and they  found exactly the same thing the same reduction in mind wandering so it seems like it should  translate to real world tasks.

If I could do some untested speculation, it's things that are demanding and it has to be demanding perceptually  so and that's important because actually there have been similar studies where they give people  tasks that are hard in a different way, sort of hard like you have to be really clever  to do that sort of thing as opposed to just hard looking at lots of stuff and that can have  the opposite effect that can make you have more intrusive thoughts. So I would think maybe things  like embroidery or maybe playing like a computer game where there's lots of stuff on screen to  move around or these kinds of things It's nice to hear it from an expert because it seems pretty obvious when you say it's like I'm thinking about this person too much, you've got to switch things  up and try something new. I think people always sort of overestimate how responsible we are  for our own attention because the whole thing about attention is that it's only partly under our  control and we'd want it to be that way.

If it was fully under our control we would be getting like  run over by cars all the time and we wouldn't be able to react to anything unexpected you know. It's  just kind of how attention works that some things have to grab us without us wanting it to. So to  answer listener Elkin's question, daydreams are completely normal and do have a purpose.

They're  a tool that we use to learn from the past and to help us navigate the future but there's also  a darker side to it. Some of us daydream more than others, like Taylor living with maladaptive  daydreaming. She often finds herself stuck in a world of fantasy against her will.

If like Elkin you want to daydream less, just being aware of your thoughts might be enough to snap you out of  it but finding something that's visually demanding can help force you to remain present. Our daydreams are complicated and mysterious so I want to leave you with this, a little thought experiment. The next  time that an idea or thought threatens to take control of your mind, it took three seconds to form.

What's it doing in that time, is that thought you?