How many students have been reprimanded for daydreaming? How many of those same students could have produced exemplary work if, instead of receiving reprimands, they received encouragement? Let’s go one step further. What if we not only encourage daydreaming- or mind-wandering- we actively prompt it in the classroom? A study conducted at University of California in Santa Barbara with 145 adults ages 18 to 32 may give teachers the support they need when making a case for allowing for mind-wandering to promote creativity (1).
In an article in the 2012 journal Association for Psychological Science titled “Inspired by Distraction: Mind Wandering Facilitates Creative Incubation,” authors Baird et. al looked at the link between solving problems in creative ways and providing an opportunity for those solutions to occur. Let’s look at what the study examined then what it could mean for teachers.
First, imagine a group of adults are given a brick and are asked for a list of possible uses for the brick. Before the group begins thinking of creative building patterns for the brick, they discover the catch; the uses of the brick must be different from the brick’s typical purpose. How many uses can the person list before the well of creativity runs dry? After a short period of time, the group is stopped and divided into four sub-groups. They are either given a somewhat taxing activity that requires them to use their memory, they are given a more laissez-faire activity that allows their mind a chance to wander at will, they are given a chance to rest, or they are instructed to simply continue thinking of new uses for the brick.
After a period of time, all groups return to the original task, finding new uses for that brick. Which of these sub-groups created the most extensive list of uses? It is not, as a demanding teacher may assume, the group pushed to continue without a break, nor is it the group, as perhaps the well-meaning teacher might believe, the group given a short rest period. Instead, the group who is given the easier task - not the memory-dependent one - created the most extensive list of possible uses for that very ordinary brick.
