These are the reasons why the mind wanders

It may be common for the mind to wander. The thread of conversation gets lost in a business meeting or appointment or in an explanation from the teacher at school, so focus is one circumstance that is in decline. So scientists at the University of Oslo discovered a cause for mind wandering.

The explanation behind what happens in the brain when people report daydreaming has emerged from the researcher Anna Chambers of the Institute of Basic Medical Sciences and her team of scientists looked at the duration of memory retention. “You actually have short dreams thousands of times a day, often for a few seconds.”Chambers says.

In addition, the specialist explains, “Inside the brain there is a sausage-shaped area 3 centimeters long called the hippocampus. It requires a lot of information and impressions and is important for the formation of memories. However, after a certain period of time, the memories seem to disappear. They persist.”

In the details of the study published in the specialized journal “Cell Reports”, the researcher explained that “70 years ago, a patient’s hippocampus was removed due to epilepsy, and without this part of his brain, he would not be able to form new memories. Later he would forget what he did.” It happened the day before, but he had no trouble remembering what happened before the surgery. So memories have long been stored in a different place in the brain than the hippocampus. When you dream the same thing happens, your memories are stored in a new place.”

Non-perishable souvenirs

How do memories reach the parts of the brain that deal with long-term storage? It’s a question the professionals asked themselves, before Koen Vervaijk of the Department of Molecular Medicine at the University of Oslo explained:

“During sleep and in a state of what we call silent wakefulness, we often find that we are less aware of what is going on around us. We may daydream or let our minds wander. When we find ourselves in this situation, the hippocampus sends out electrical impulses that encode various memories. It is similar to Some different barcodes that uniquely identify a product in the store.This happens thousands of times a day without us realizing it.So even when we think we’re not doing anything useful, our brains are too busy storing new memories over time.

Researchers believe this allows them to remember where they grew up or what school they attended. As a rule, you can dream about where you got married, went on vacation or lost something important. “You probably remember these places so well that you can draw a map of the city streets or the rooms in the building you live in,” Chambers confirmed. The team conducted experiments on mice to get a closer look at what happens when the mind wanders. They used special microscopes to measure the activity of neurons in multiple areas of the brain simultaneously.

Christopher Nierland Berg, another scientist involved in the study, added: “We found that during quiet wakefulness, the hippocampus sends only weak messages about past memories to the rest of the brain. And they are so weak that these messages are lost in the chaos of information they are experiencing.” This finding led to the following question: How can the brain hear this whisper from the hippocampus?

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As they check, the brain becomes quieter so it can better hear what the hippocampus is trying to say. A second or two before the hippocampus whispers a memory, a large part of the brain becomes silent. This could be so that other parts of the brain can better hear what the hippocampus is trying to say. Some parents think they should keep their kids entertained all the time, and not give them time to get bored, however, “with the new findings, we think you might need to get bored, and that’s good for making memories,” Werwijk concluded.

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