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Daydreaming-An Virtue or Vice? (Estimated Reading Time 6-7 minutes.)

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Author's Note: The facts and figures of this post have been adopted from the book “Imagine" under the written permission of the Author.


                    Humans are a daydreaming species.It's an an one of the Life's great joys. According to a recent study led by the Harvard psychologists, Daniel Gilbert and Matthew , people let their minds wander 47 per-cent of the time they are awake. The scientists demonstrated this by developing an iPhone app that contacted 22 hundred and 50 volunteers at random intervals during the day.
                    At first glance, data seems like a confirmation of our inherent laziness. In a culture obsessed with efficiency, mind-wandering is often derided as useless—the kind of thinking we rely on when we don’t really want to think. Freud, for instance, described daydreams as “infantile” and a means of escaping from the necessary chores of the world into fantasies of “wish-fulfillment.”
                     In recent years, however, psychologists and neuroscientists have redeemed this mental state, revealing the ways in which mind-wandering is an essential cognitive tool. It turns out that whenever we are slightly bored—when reality isn’t quite enough for us—we begin exploring our own associations, contemplating counterfactuals and fictive scenarios that only exist within the head.
                   Virginia Woolf, in her novel “To The Lighthouse,” eloquently describes this form of thinking as it unfolds inside the mind of a character named Lily:
Certainly she was losing consciousness of outer things. And as she lost consciousness of outer things … her mind kept throwing up from its depths, scenes, and names, and sayings, and memories and ideas, like a fountain spurting.
                       A daydream is that fountain spurting, spilling strange new thoughts into the stream of consciousness. And these spurts turn out to be surprisingly useful. The experiment itself was simple: a hundred and forty-five undergraduate students were given a standard test of creativity known as an “unusual use” task, in which they had two minutes to list as many uses as possible for mundane objects such as toothpicks, bricks, and clothes hangers.
                     The benefit of these simple tasks is that they consume just enough attention to keep us occupied, while leaving plenty of mental resources left over for errant daydreams. When people are left alone, such as those subjects forced to sit by themselves, they tend to perseverate on their problems. Unfortunately, all this focus backfires. 
                   A daydream, in this sense, is just a means of eavesdropping on those novel thoughts generated by the unconscious. We think we’re wasting time, but, actually, an intellectual fountain really is spurting.
                    So, the answer to the question, 'Whether it is an Virtue or the Vice?' is very clear. "Daydreaming" is an 'Virtue' as it keeps one always passionate for thinking and developing the studies which is one of the toughest job of nowadays. Think for a While!.                                                  -AMAN AHUJA    

                  

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