Analysis Of Daydreaming

Expos: Daydreaming

The article “Daydreaming to navigate the social world: what we know, what we don’t know, and why it matters”, written by Giulia Lara Poerio and Jonathan Smallwood, suggests that daydreaming is a potentially adaptive form of social cognition that works to benefit a person’s health and social life in several ways. An extensive review of multiple peer-reviewed articles served as the basis for argument on these topics, as well as the authors’ own interpretation of data collected in several other studies. Showing that daydreaming and other socially cognitive mechanisms share a similar neural basis.
Daydreaming is thought of in a lot of different ways, potentially because it is a very complex, heterogeneous process. While some
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Investigations spanning multiple countries and multiple lab studies “indicate that between 30% and 50% of waking life is spent daydreaming” (Poerio and Smallwood, 2016). The heterogeneous nature of daydreaming includes many types of self-generated thought (e.g. worrying, involuntary memories, fantasies, etc.) that a person could focus on separately for varying amounts of time depending on their personality. Adding up all the time spent generating these different types of thought, it is hard to ignore the significance of daydreaming in some form or
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The validity of the debate is very apparent in the amount of contrasting evidence that daydreaming is either helpful or harmful in certain ways. Studies have shown that daydreaming hurts performance when focus is required to complete tasks, and also that it can have negative effects on physiological and mental health. Evidence such as this contributes to the idea that daydreaming is simply a “lapse of attention”. The argument that daydreaming is adaptive is dependent on the notion that daydreaming can help a person focus on the bigger picture, involving many different goals, and that daydreaming generates a desire for social