Via Mindshift dit onderzoek gevonden waaruit blijkt dat dagdromen goed kan zijn, meer nog: nodig is. Professor Mary Helen Immordino-Yang van de University of Southern California, stelt dat het nodig is om kinderen de waarde te leren van een meer diffuse mentale activiteit, dagdromen, herinneren en reflecteren
Deze vormen van introspectie is cruciaal voor onze mentale gezondheid, voor onze relaties en voor onze emotionele en morele ontwikkeling. En opvallend, het helpt ook voor wat ouders en leerkrachten zo belangrijk vinden: kinderen leren focussen op de buitenwereld.
Volgens de onderzoekers heeft ons brein 2 besturingssystemen. Het eerste noemen ze het “looking out system,” waarmee we ons oriënteren op de externe omgeving en zorgt er voor dat we dingen gedaan krijgen. Het andere, wat ze het “looking in system,” noemen, doet ons innerlijk kijken.
Mindshift vat samen:
By scanning the brains of study subjects asked simply to rest and relax, scientists have discovered that our minds are anything but inactive in these moments. Relieved of the obligation to pay attention to what’s going on around us, we engage instead with a rich internal environment: recalling the past, imagining the future, replaying recent interactions and sorting out our feelings. It’s when we engage our brains’ “looking in” mode, notes Immordino-Yang, that we make meaning out of the mass of experiences and information we encounter when we’re “looking out.”
Young people may have fewer opportunities to exercise the vital capacity of introspection. Immordino-Yang fingers two culprits: educational practices that demand constant attentiveness, even from young children, and a hyper-connected world that insistently draws attention away from the world inside. “If youths overuse social media, if they spend very little waking time free from the possibility that a text will interrupt them,” the authors write, “we would expect that these conditions might predispose youths toward focusing on the concrete, physical and immediate aspects of situation and self, with less inclination toward considering the abstract, longer-term, moral and emotional implications of their and others’ actions.”
Abstract van het onderzoek (gratis te downloaden):
When people wakefully rest in the fMRI scanner, their minds wander, and they engage a socalled “default mode” of neural processing (DM) that is relatively suppressed when attention is focused on the outside world. Accruing evidence suggests that DM brain systems activated during rest are also important for active, internally-focused psychosocial mental processing, for example when recalling personal memories, imagining the future, and feeling social emotions with moral connotations. Here we review evidence for the DM and relations to psychological functioning, including associations with mental health and cognitive abilities like reading comprehension and divergent thinking. We call for research into the dimensions of internallyfocused thought, ranging from free-form daydreaming and off-line consolidation to intensive, effortful abstract thinking, especially with socio-emotional relevance. We argue that the development of some socio-emotional skills may be vulnerable to disruption by environmental distraction, for example from certain educational practices or overuse of social media. We hypothesize that high environmental attention demands may bias youngsters to focus on the concrete, physical and immediate aspects of social situations and self, which may be more
compatible with external attention. We coin the term “constructive internal reflection” and advocate educational practices that promote effective balance between external attention and internal reflection.
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