Daydreaming During Boring Meetings Sign Of Intelligence, Creativity

Have you ever lived out a whole movie scenario in your head, one where you rescue people from the clutches of death and casually walk away, or stop a bank robbery with a series of increasingly difficult fight moves, when in reality you are at a very boring but equally important presentation on office policy? Well, you can now just say that you are too smart, creative and intellectually rich that you don’t have to pay attention, according to a new study.

A team from Georgia Institute of Technology conducted a closed-group research that showed daydreaming during meetings isn't necessarily a bad thing. Instead, it might be a sign that you're really smart and creative.

Eric Schumacher, a Georgia Tech associate psychology professor and co-author of the study, said this was because when the brain capacity is too much, it becomes hard to stop minds from wandering.

"People with efficient brains may have too much brain capacity to stop their minds from wandering," he said in a report published on the Georgia Tech website.

Schumacher, along with co-author Christine Godwin, assembled a team that set out to measure brain patterns of more than 100 people while they lay in an MRI machine. Participants were asked to do some mundane activity that would keep the brain in a resting state. They were simply asked to focus on a stationary point for five minutes. The Georgia Tech team used the data to identify which parts of the brain worked in unison.

"The correlated brain regions gave us insight about which areas of the brain work together during an awake, resting state," said Godwin, a Georgia Tech psychology Ph.D. candidate. "Interestingly, research has suggested that these same brain patterns measured during these states are related to different cognitive abilities."

Once a dataset was established for a brain at rest, the team collected and compared the data with the intelligence and creativity levels of the participants. They also filled out a questionnaire about how much their mind wandered in daily life.

"People tend to think of mind wandering as something that is bad. You try to pay attention and you can't," said Schumacher. "Our data are consistent with the idea that this isn't always true. Some people have more efficient brains." The findings of the study show that frequent daydreamers scored higher on intellectual and creative ability and had more efficient brain systems as measured in the study.

The team says that one way of identifying an efficient brain is to check your ability to zone in and out of daily tasks and still be productive. This means that if you can flit in and out of some played-out relationship rant and still grasp enough to keep it going without letting the other person know that you are actually replaying Die Hard in your head with you playing McClane and them playing Gruber, you are good to go.

This ability to tune out and naturally grasp important parts to ensure a structural understanding of the world without paying real attention is one of the chief markers of intelligence, according to the researchers.

"Our findings remind me of the absent-minded — someone who's brilliant, but off in his or her own world, sometimes oblivious to their own surroundings," said Schumacher in the report. "Or school children who are too intellectually advanced for their classes. While it may take five minutes for their friends to learn something new, they figure it out in a minute, then check out and start daydreaming."

The team hopes this study will help people see a wandering mind as a fast and creative one capable of producing brilliance. They hope that these people are identified and helped rather than be forced to change with medication that will slow their brains.