Zoning Out Is Your Brain’s Superpower

Your brain is exceptionally talented at allowing you to solve daily crossword puzzles, recall details from the distant past (like the name of your fourth-grade teacher), and navigate a complex subway system (like the Paris Metro). But there are also times when your brain won’t cooperate. It behaves like a willful child who refuses to do what you are asking it to do.

You’ll know what I’m talking about if:

• You find yourself reading the same passage of text over and over (possibly even here) but realize that you didn’t retain any of it.
• Your partner was talking to you for a good three minutes, but you didn’t hear a word they said.
• You are staring directly at the security training video your company requires you to watch but haven’t heard any of the five ways to protect your email from hackers.

In all these examples, your mind was somewhere else and not focused where you wanted it to be. We call it daydreaming, mind wandering, or zoning out, and we do it all the time. We are taught that it is a frivolous, noisy distraction that we need to eliminate from our minds.

While the popular advice is to rein in your mind, you might be surprised to learn that our ability to disengage from the present and immerse ourselves in imaginary worlds is one of our most extraordinary gifts as humans. Think of all the ways you do it.

• When your mind drifts to the past, and you remember the time your parent tried to teach you how to drive
• When you imagine yourself in the future, giving a speech at your best friend’s wedding
• When you replay an argument you had with your spouse and try to figure out what they were thinking when they said something hurtful
• When you are reading a book or watching a movie, and you cry when the protagonist dies because it feels so real

In all these examples, you have taken a mental voyage. Your mind has “left the building.” You are gone. Your dog or cat can “be present” and “in the moment,” but they can’t engage in the abstract and complex imaginary thoughts you can.

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You may believe that the kinds of things you think about while zoning out are trivial. So how can it be good for you? The reality is that even when our daydreams or projections seem absurd and irrelevant, they are a vital form of mental exercise that improves our psychological functioning in important ways—making our minds more flexible, more agile, and better prepared to take on whatever may come our way.

Although you are undoubtedly very familiar with how your mind periodically drifts off-topic, scientists only recently decided to focus on this ability.

In 1985, psychologist Endel Tulving, a pioneer in memory research, became the first to recognize this capacity for separating ourselves from the present. Later, Harvard University researchers Randy Buckner and Daniel Carroll coined the term self-projection to describe this phenomenon in which we “project” ourselves away from the present moment.

This ability to mentally simulate imaginary scenarios, also known as mental time travel, is one of the core faculties that make humans exceptional. If there is no pressing task for you to do in the present moment, then your brain has a boarding pass to go on these little mental voyages. Or if you are tired or easily distracted while reading a textbook, your brain, without consent, sets off on a journey to an alternate world.

What some would call zoning out is, in fact, a vital evolutionary function of the human brain that allows us to imagine a world beyond our immediate reality. The more you are aware of this capacity, the more you can cultivate it to help you become a more flexible, open, and creative thinker. What does mental time travel do for you exactly?

If we stay locked into the present, we stay rigidly attached to our preconceived ideas, beliefs, and biases. When you separate from the present moment to project yourself to the future, the mindset of another, or into a story narrative, you embrace a form of cognitive flexibility that’s unavailable when you focus on the present.

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Psychological barriers are lowered. Suddenly, ideas, concepts, and possibilities that you might not have considered have a better chance of coming to mind and influencing your behavior in positive ways. Your thinking is fluid.

Most importantly, this fluidity allows you to picture a world outside your reality, a vital component for growth and development as it is the first step toward turning something imagined into something tangible. And this is the critical step in transforming your imaginings into reality.