When not focused on one or more tasks, our brain emits “ripples.”
- Scientists have been investigating what happens in our brains when our minds wander.
- To do this, they carried out analyses on people suffering from epilepsy.
- They then discovered that our brain emits “ripples” when we daydream.
Almost everyone daydreams, but not much is known about it. To fill in the gaps, a team of scientists set out to identify the brain activities that occur when we let our thoughts run wild.
Brain and daydreams: a study on people with epilepsy
People with epilepsy are a particularly interesting basis for studying this phenomenon. Indeed, for some of these patients, drug treatments fail to stop the seizures. Neurosurgeons can then remove the part of the brain where the seizures are triggered, but they must first carefully monitor the patient’s brain activity to ensure that they are acting in the right place.
The researchers therefore recruited 10 patients who were waiting for this intervention to participate in their study. Electrodes were implanted in their hippocampus and parahippocampal gyrus, two areas of the brain associated with memory.
For 10 days, the patients were monitored and completed questionnaires every hour about their thoughts and emotions. “We mainly wanted to see if we could identify links between the recorded brain activity and how patients were feeling and thinking at that time,” explained study director Takamitsu Iwata in a press release.
Brain and daydreams: when do “ripples” appear?
At the end of his report, his team indicates that the detection “of ripples” were more frequent “when participants’ thoughts were more vivid and less desirable. They also contained more imaginary elements and had fewer correlations with an external task.”
“Although our study was conducted entirely on people with epilepsy, we did our best to remove data related to this condition so that our results are applicable to everyone,” said Takufumi Yanagisawa.
The authors of the research conclude that their data help support the hypothesis that the medial temporal lobe of the brain plays an important role in our mind wandering.
“We hope that further research will allow us to unlock more of the secrets of what the human brain does when it is not directly focused on a task,” conclude the scientists.
Our brain works alone 30% of the time
By some estimates, our brain is not focused on our surroundings up to 30% of the time, so it very regularly wanders off into its own imaginary conceptions.
The research detailed in this article is published in Nature Communications.