Scientists at Bar-Ilan University first demonstrated how an external stimulus of low-level electricity can literally change the way we think, producing a measurable up-tick in the rate at which daydreams occur. It is for the first time that a region of the brain was identified as the source for triggering day dreams.
Along the way, they made another surprising discovery: that while daydreams offer a welcome "mental escape" from boring tasks, they also have a positive, simultaneous effect on task performance.
The new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was carried out in Bar-Ilan's Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory supervised by Prof. Moshe Bar.
In the experiment, designed and executed by Prof. Bar's post-doctoral researcher Dr. Vadim Axelrod, participants were treated with tDCS, a painless procedure that uses low-level electricity to stimulate specific brain regions. They found that when the frontal lobes were stimulated, subjects reported their brain to start wandering.
"We focused tDCS stimulation on the frontal lobes because this brain region has been previously implicated in mind wandering, and also because is a central locus of the executive control network that allows us to organize and plan for the future," Bar explained, adding that he suspected that there might be a connection between the two.
"Our results go beyond what was achieved in earlier, fMRI-based studies," Bar states. "They demonstrate that the frontal lobes play a causal role in the production of mind wandering behavior."
In an unanticipated finding, the present study demonstrated how the increased mind wandering behavior produced by external stimulation not only does not harm subjects' ability to succeed at an appointed task, it actually helps. Bar believes that this surprising result might stem from the convergence, within a single brain region, of both the "thought controlling" mechanisms of executive function and the "thought freeing" activity of spontaneous, self-directed daydreams.
"Over the last 15 or 20 years, scientists have shown that - unlike the localized neural activity associated with specific tasks - mind wandering involves the activation of a gigantic default network involving many parts of the brain," Bar says. "This cross-brain involvement may be involved in behavioral outcomes such as creativity and mood, and may also contribute to the ability to stay successfully on-task while the mind goes off on its merry mental way."
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