Jonah Lehrer from The Frontal Cortex reports on research that links resting state activity (the state in which daydreaming occurs) in the brain with the stimulation of long-range neural connectivity and hence intelligence. He refers to an article by Whitfield-Gabrieli and Gabrieli in Mind Matters and states:
"(they) ... outline some interesting new research on the link between resting state activity - the performance of the brain when it's lying still in a brain scanner, doing nothing but daydreaming - and general intelligence. It turns out that cultivating an active idle mind, or teaching yourself how to daydream effectively, might actually encourage the sort of long-range neural connections that make us smart. At the very least, it's time we stop discouraging kids from staring out the classroom window, because mind wandering isn't a waste of time."
He quotes Whitfield-Gabrieli and Gabrieli in their discussion of research by Ming Song:
"Like prior researchers, they found that the posterior cingulate cortex is the hub of the human brain - it is the most widely and intensively connected region of the human brain at rest. Moreover, the strength of connectivity among distant brain regions was greater in people with superior than average IQ scores. Another 2009 study came to a similar conclusion, and noted that the strongest relations between resting connectivity and IQ were observed in the frontal and parietal brain regions, which have been most associated with performance on IQ tests.
Thus, remarkably, the strength of long-distance connections in the resting brain can be related to performance on IQ tests. We are often impressed when people make creative connections between ideas - perhaps long-range connectivity in the brain empowers such mental range."
Interesting stuff indeed, but still no justification for therapies that focus without evidence for effectiveness on the claimed improvement of inter- and intra-hemispheric connectivity.
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