Names of the Thoughts and Images that Arise when Attention Drifts Away

Over the past decades, researchers have assigned various names to the thoughts and images that arise when attention drifts away from external tasks and perceptual input toward a more private, internal stream of consciousness. One of the most common term used was Daydreaming. Many in the field of psychology have attempted to study and explore the inner realm of daydreams and fantasies. Each taking different claims, defining daydreams in many ways. Freud considered daydreaming and fantasizing as a defence mechanism. Freudian psychology interpreted daydreaming as expression of the repressed instincts similarly to those revealing themselves in night-time dreams; they are thoughts about wish fulfilment. Many of us also view daydreaming not only as defense mechanism, but also as coping mechanism. In line with this thought, Klinger (1980) reported that people daydream to cope up with mundane life. He claimed that people subject to daydreaming to “ease the boredom” of their routine tasks. Singer (1996) defined daydreaming as a shift of attention away from an on-going physical or mental task or from a perceptual response to external stimulation toward some internal stimulus. According to Giambra (1993) Task unrelated thoughts are the internal sources of simuli. Task Unrelated Thoughts (TUTs) (Smallwood, Baracaia, Lowe, & Obansawinb, 2003) are thought directed away from the current situation, for example a daydream. Going more scientific and neuropsychological, researchers and neuroscientists (Mason et al., 2007) studied the area of the brain labelled as the default mode network (DMN) of the brain - more commonly known as running on auto-pilot. They say that the brain will switch to doing something useful like daydreaming and imagining when...

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...003) Task Unrelated Thought: the role of distributed processing. Consciousness and Cognition. 12(2), 169-189.

Smallwood, J., Tipper, C, Brown, K., Baird, B., Engen, H., Michaels, J. Grafton, S, & Schooler, J.W. (2013). Escaping the here and now: Evidence for a role of the default mode network in perceptually decoupled thought. Neuroimage.

Somer, Eli (2002). "Maladaptive Daydreaming: A Qualitative Inquiry". Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy (Springer) 32 (2-3): 197–212.

Strachey, J. (1953). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume V (1900-1901): The Interpretation of Dreams (Second Part) and On Dreams. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis. p. 492.

Warren, Jeff (2007). "The Daydream". The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness. Toronto: Random House Canada.ISBN 978-0-679-31408-0.