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B E H A V I O R ) & ) S O C I E T Y

Daydreaming May Help

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New research explains why relationships take up so much of ourmental energy

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By(Dana(G.(Smith(on(May(24,(2018

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What do you think about when your mind wanders? Chances are, you reflect back on past situations,think about plans for the future or plumb your inner psyche to take stock of your thoughts andfeelings. And many of these ruminations likely involve other people.

When our brains are not otherwise occupied, a network of neural regions called the default modenetwork automatically comes online. It enables us to turn our attention inward and daydream, but italso helps us to project out and put ourselves in other people’s shoes.

In addition to their role in the default mode network, two of the areas—the temporoparietal junction(TPJ) and the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC)—are also important processing centers for socialinformation. The TPJ helps us evaluate other people’s personality traits and emotions and infer theirstates of mind whereas the mPFC becomes active when we engage in self-reflection and think about

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our own qualities and social standing.

Scientists have known about the disparate functions of these two regions, but they did not know howthe social areas fit into the default mode network. A recent paper published in Cerebral Cortexsuggests rest is a critical time for the TPJ and mPFC to commit information about people’s names andprofessions as well as physical and personality traits to memory. The areas are first engaged when wemeet or learn about new people, and they flip back on later as part of the default mode network toprocess the personal information when we are at rest.

The engagement of these regions at rest may “help us consistently learn social information,” says leadauthor Meghan Meyer, an assistant professor of psychology at Dartmouth College. “The brain mightbe prioritizing social learning, and that’s why there is this tendency for these regions to engage bydefault.”

Meyer’s team developed a task to be performed in a magnetic resonance imaging scanner to see whatwas happening in the brain after new social information was learned. The test alternated betweenpresenting participants with social or nonsocial information and periods of rest. In the social scenario

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participants saw a picture of a person paired with their job title and two personal adjectives. Thenonsocial scenario included pictures of geographical places, the country where the photograph wastaken and two descriptive words of the place. After each task the participants were told to let theirminds wander.

The researchers found the TPJ and mPFC bumped up their engagement with each other during therest that followed the social task, and this connectivity corresponded to better memory of the socialinformation later. In a surprising twist, the researchers saw greater connectivity between the TPJ andmPFC during rest after the nonsocial task as well, but only if the participants had performed the socialtask earlier. Meyer says the fact these regions come back online so quickly whenever our minds arefree, even if they’ve been doing something else in the meantime, is unlikely to be a coincidence.“Perhaps our brains are sort of designed to maximize social learning,” she says. “It’s like a reflex thatkicks on whenever we don’t have to attend to something else” to help us navigate our socialenvironment.

Jessica Andrews-Hanna, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Arizona who wasnot involved in the research, says the study was “excellent” and “made many important novelcontributions.” She adds, “To be able to look at whether these even very brief periods of mental breakallow our brains to do something useful and functional is a really important finding.”

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The study also confirms what scientists think about how our brains process memory. When we rest, abrain region called the hippocampus becomes active, replaying recent events to transfer them fromshort- to long-term memory. During rest after the social task, the mPFC connected with thehippocampus, providing support for the idea these social regions have an important memoryfunction. “One of the main reasons—or adaptive potentials—to take breaks, even short breaksthroughout our day-to-day life, is to help us retain information longer and transfer it into long-termmemory,” Andrews-Hanna notes. “The Meyer study is the first to extend these findings to socialinformation and our memory of other people.”

Meyer says one real-world application of the study could be that people need to get more restthroughout the day. “I think this data highlights that it might not always be a bad thing to bedistracted with this system [the default mode network]. It might be doing something important for usthat’s helping us learn about social information,” she says. For example, “taking a break after a bigmeeting might help you learn whatever you just witnessed socially.”

That our brain networks prioritize the enhancement of our social networks is worth remembering. Weshould all probably go back to our baselines—default mode—a little more often each day.

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Dana)G.)Smith

Dana(Smith(is(a(freelance(science(writer(specializing(in(brains(and(bodies.(She(has(written(for(Scientific

American,(The(Atlantic,(The(Guardian,(NPR,(Discover,(and(Fast(Company,(among(other(outlets.(In(a(previous(life,

she(earned(a(PhD(in(experimental(psychology(from(the(University(of(Cambridge.

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