Culturally we are all sensitized to relating the act of daydreaming to that of a lazy mind. School-aged children are repeatedly encouraged to stop daydreaming and to “focus” upon the task at-hand. Additionally, a wandering mind is often cited as a leading cause of traffic accidents in adults. This theorized lack of discipline in mental focus has garnished a bad, very incorrect rap.

There has been interesting research out of MIT on the link between resting state activity – the performance of the brain when it’s simply “lying still”, doing nothing but daydreaming, and general intelligence. It seems that cultivating an “active idle” mind, or teaching one how to daydream effectively, might actually encourage the sort of long-range neural connectivity that underpins intelligence. At a minimum, I won’t reprimand my kids when they stare blankly out the window, because this healthy mind wandering isn’t a waste of time at all.

For the first time, functional measures of the idle/active brain are providing interesting insights into network properties of the brain that are significantly associated with IQ scores. In essence, the findings suggest that in smart people, distant areas of the brain communicate with each other more robustly than in less-than smart people. Moreover, the strength of connectivity among distant areas within the biological neural network was greater in people with superior than average IQ scores. Additional research positively correlated with this initial finding, that the strongest relations between resting connectivity and IQ were observed in the frontal and parietal brain regions – the area’s most associated with performance on IQ tests.

Source: Scientific American, Jan. 2010