Maybe it’s just me, but sometimes it feels like the news media, the scientific establishment, and our mothers are in cahoots to undermine every decision we make as adults. “Nearly 1 in 5 older women are going childless,” reads one hectoring headline; it might as well say, “Study Finds That Your Eggs Aren’t Going to Last Forever, You Know. And Have You Done Something Different With Your Hair?” Occasionally, though, some wonderfully enabling news will escape from the annals of science, justifying what we think of as our worst habits, like the recent report that coffee— and lots of it— may prevent cancer. Earlier this week, the New York Times relayed some decidedly mixed messages. In short: daydreaming is good for you, except when it’s not.
The good half of the news is that a tendency for flights of fancy does not automatically make one a starry-eyed, tragicomic figure like Walter Mitty. In fact, daydreaming can function as an important coping mechanism. John Tierney writes, “A wandering mind can protect you from immediate perils and keep you on course toward long-term goals. Sometimes daydreaming is counterproductive, but sometimes it fosters creativity and helps you solve problems.” So, dreaming about the private Caribbean island you’ll one day own is probably not a good thing when you’re, say, a writer with a looming deadline; but on a long car ride through Kansas, such flights of fancy are not just harmless, they’re practically essential. Daydreaming keeps us from dwelling on the drudgery of the task at hand and allows us to focus on longer-term goals of prosperity and happiness—even on the off-chance that our private island estate never comes to be.
Mind-wandering might be a boon to the long-distance driver (or runner, for that matter), but what about readers? Aye, there’s the rub. “If your mind is elsewhere while your eyes are scanning Tolstoy’s or Austen’s words, you’re wasting your own time,” says Tierney. This seems more like common sense than a groundbreaking discovery: if you’re not absorbed in the book you’re reading, you ought to find another one to read. The problem is that our minds do wander … a lot. Tierney describes research conducted by Dr. Jonathan Schooler at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In one experiment, readers breezed past intentionally botched sentences without stopping to make sense of the gibberish. In another, a machine tracked the eye movements of people reading “Sense and Sensibility.” Schooler found that mind-wandering episodes were frequent, and could last up to two minutes at a time.
At first, this seems pretty troubling, though I have to wonder how I might fare under the circumstances. I know from my own experience that at the beginning of a book— or even a long article— my mind is more likely to drift away; it takes me some time to really feel anchored in a piece of writing, to get into the particular rhythms of a book. Is that such a terrible thing? He also found that consuming alcohol made it twice as likely that subject would zone out while reading. Specifically, Schooler looked at the effects of vodka cocktails on readers of “War and Peace.” No word yet on what happens if you swill some Jameson before reading “Ulysses.” That’s an experiment I may conduct on my own— in the name of science, of course.
