Whither Daydreaming in the Digital World?

How Daydreaming Nourishes the Brain — And Googling Starves It

My dentist has an office near Alameda’s shoreline, a couple of blocks from the San Francisco bay. After my appointments I walk along the rocky coast, buffeted by the wind, inhaling tangy salt air. Memories of dental torment dissolve in the lapping waves and the view of my native city on the western horizon. If it’s late in the day, I watch fishermen on the seawall reeling in striped bass and throwing back stingrays.

I've never understood the appeal of fishing per se, but I do appreciate the quiet, contemplative aspect. The soft-focus gazing at the water. The waiting. But my local fishermen resemble everyone else in the modern world, heads bowed in obeisance to an insatiable god. No more silent hours with the mind drifting like a boat unmoored, no more do we let ourselves be gently delivered to parts unknown. Like the rest of us, the fishermen have chosen to cram digital stimulation into every waking moment.

I see this same sad phenomenon on my hikes in Tilden Regional Park, up in the Berkeley hills. The few people who walk alone are all plugged in to a device — listening to music, or a podcast, or blathering at another human across time and space. When they could instead be luxuriating in the sensation of sun and breeze on skin, the creaking groan of eucalyptus trees, the pungent scent of sagebrush. Along with the pleasures of the natural world, calm, silence, and daydreaming are fast being relegated to the dustbin of analog history.

The Mind Has a Mind of Its Own

Some years ago I heard an interview with the author Dani Shapiro. She spoke with a certain wistfulness about an earlier era of cigarettes and typewriters. Back then, when she was momentarily stumped, she'd light up a cigarette and ease into a "ritualized daydream" for five minutes, maybe staring out the window, "allowing my thoughts to sort themselves out." After which she'd go back to work on her novel refreshed.

Now that computers and clean living have replaced Olivettis and Pall Malls, those five minutes are more likely to be spent catching up on emails, tweeting, or searching out ephemera online. This is an altogether different kind of break for it involves the directed focus applied to searching, rather than the altered state we enter when watching cloud formations, letting our brain rest, and thinking about . . . nothing, with or without a cigarette. And while the steady decline of smoking is an unalloyed good, losing our capacity to daydream would be a tragedy.

I love the notion of thoughts sorting themselves out--with no conscious effort on our part--as if there were elves in the brain that only come on duty when the neocortex takes a break from heavy cognitive lifting. We've all experienced this, the moment of insight that arrives when you're dozing off or lathering up in the shower. You're not focused at all and into your mind drops the perfect turn of phrase, the solution to a tricky situation, the memory of where you left your gym bag. Insight is the gift of downtime, the reward for giving ourselves a break from periods of deep focus as well as hours spent reflexively snapping at digital lures.

Great Moments in Daydreaming History

Some of the greatest thinkers in history arrived at their epic discoveries not as they toiled away in a cramped garret, but while they were relaxing. Isaac Newton, drinking tea in his mother's garden, watches an apple fall to the ground and suddenly understands gravitational force. Archimedes slides into a bath and, observing his body displace water, comprehends the relationship between objects and volume. Einstein daydreams about lightning when a metaphoric bolt strikes, igniting his special theory of relativity.

You don't have to be a genius to receive extraordinary neural transmissions. But you do have to prepare the field, for an insight can only bloom in a garden that's been seeded — with the literature, ideas, theories, images, principles, songs, poems, equations, and stories we have absorbed and consolidated in long-term memory. The seeds take root, sprout and cross-pollinate. Then one day, in the middle of your raised beds of kale, up pops a slender golden iris.

It seems clear that Nature wants us to learn, study, and grow, just as much as she wants us to chill out, because evolution favors those who are adept at both. Current research agrees that the best way to foster creativity is by toggling between intense thinking and routine tasks that allow your thoughts to drift, such as chopping vegetables, cleaning house, or walking the dog. By contrast, when you’re grazing on internet fodder your mind is not wandering freely; you are being led.

Everyday Inspirations

Many of my inspirations come through while I'm sitting on the porch in front of my apartment, having breakfast in that blissful hour before I hook up my internet IV. Last year I was struggling to come up with a costume for the Halloween edition of my favorite poetry reading series. I like to put together something that corresponds to the poem I'll be performing. I had no idea what could possibly work with “I’m Much Too Busy to Die,” and the day was drawing near.

So I'm out on the porch eating oatmeal and I notice a blue Post-it note at the base of my neighbor's pear tree. That's odd, I think. My neighbor is an elderly woman, very old-world, who just doesn’t seem like the Post-it type. Maybe it's one of mine that has blown into her yard? Should I go over and pick it up? I don’t want to scare her by my unannounced presence. I was such a jerk to my neighbors in fifth grade! Don’t I have her phone number somewhere? And in the midst of this miscellaneous musing — Boom! — the Halloween solution falls into my lap: I'll cover my body with Post-it notes on which I've scribbled items from my never-ending to-do list! Which is exactly what I did. The poem was a hit, and I took second place in the costume contest. Okay, as far as bright ideas go it's not quite Quantum Theory, but it's mine, not something I cribbed off Pinterest. It's also a humble example of how random associations generate ideas, if we release the reins and let the mind frolic in a land without fences.

The Unintended Consequences of Outsourcing Learning

Insights and revelations come to us unbidden, arising, it seems, "out of nowhere." They feel like gifts. Which is why so many legendary artists and writers have declared that they are merely channels for God or supplicants to the Muse. Whether we believe our bright ideas are divinely ordained or the happy accident of evolution, our creative output is only as rich as the material it has to draw from—what we have learned and know, down to our bones.

Alarmingly, with the ascension of Google, increasing numbers of us don't bother taking the time to learn things that we can find online in a nanosecond. By outsourcing the building blocks of learning we withhold mental nourishment from our default mode network, the interacting brain regions that light up when we daydream. The default mode network is always humming along beneath the surface of consciousness, finding unexpected ways to connect our moment-to-moment experiences with the lifetime of learning embedded in our neural architecture. So if facts and quotes, concepts, philosophies and theorems are not alive and accessible within us (because we're counting on Google), then they are not available for our mind to use when forging links and creating associations drawn from our native libraries of memory.

As we hand over the keys to the kingdom of knowledge to tech companies, we become ever more reliant on them, even as we starve our unfettered mind of the natural resources it needs to create.

By way of analogy, imagine someone with a very limited vocabulary laboring to write an essay. She'd be hard-pressed to produce anything of much depth and complexity—and not only due to a paucity of words. Ideation itself would be hindered because words unlock the door to larger concepts. The smaller one’s vocabulary, the fewer ingredients available with which to develop ideas.

Whereas, the writer with an extensive working vocabulary has instant internal access to that many more words and concepts for her conscious mind and her default mode network to play with. Words are brain nutrient and the richer our vocabulary the more fertile our minds.

Whether it's knowledge of a certain word or a comprehensive understanding about a particular historical epoch, when it lives inside you, your relationship with it is intimate. It’s a part of you that cannot be colonized.

If you're using the Internet to fill in a few blanks in your knowledge base, that's fine; we can't know everything. But the more we come to rely on technology to supplant living memory, the more blanks we have to fill in. Given the brain's bias toward efficiency, and our human tendency to minimize effort, it's not a stretch to imagine that, over time, the ratio of knowledge to blanks will reverse. Maybe not in this generation or the next, but eventually. And how many generations before the best an unaided human can come up with is: "See Dick run. Run, Dick, run."?

Charting a Better Course

Perhaps I exaggerate. But how close to that edge dare we tread? While the end of life as we know it is hardly a fait accompli, we are at a choice point. The actions of each individual matters, for we are all cells in the body of our culture, informing, shaping, and guiding it. Choose your role wisely. If you want to denude the soil in which imagination flourishes, by all means maintain a permanent state of distraction, deny your mind respite from information overload, and continue to outsource whatever remains of your thought processes. Tell yourself the world doesn’t need your original thinking when AI will conjure content from the scrapings of humanity that you can claim as your own.

But if you want to nurture your highest self, feed it time to daydream, unencumbered by tweets and pings and notifications. Feed it every day. Take your mind for a walk without so much as a podcast to keep you company. Sit in a café and talk with a friend with no phones present. When you're waiting in line, resist the urge to be entertained and rest into the dignity of simply…being. Liberate yourself from the algorithms of distant coders and you will begin to restore the natural rhythms of your own mind.

Now put down your phone, step outside, and howl at the moon.

Even if you can't see it.

Yet.