Scientists at Bar-Ilan University have been the first to demonstrate how an external stimulus of low-level electricity can literally change the way we think, producing a measurable up-tick in the rate at which daydreams – or spontaneous, self-directed thoughts and associations – occur. Along the way, they made another surprising discovery: that while daydreams offer a welcome “mental escape” from boring tasks, they also have a positive, simultaneous effect on task performance.
The new study was carried out in Bar-Ilan’s Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory supervised by Prof. Moshe Bar, part of the University’s Gonda (Goldschmied) Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center which Prof. Bar also directs.
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In the experiment – designed and executed by Prof. Bar’s post-doctoral researcher Dr. Vadim Axelrod – participants were treated with transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), a non-invasive and painless procedure that uses low-level electricity to stimulate specific brain regions. During treatment, the participants were asked to track and respond to numerals flashed on a computer screen. They were also periodically asked to respond to an on-screen “thought probe” in which they reported – on a scale of one to four – the extent to which they were experiencing spontaneous thoughts unrelated to the numeric task they had been given.
According to Prof. Bar – a long-time faculty member at Harvard Medical School who has authored several studies exploring the link between associative thinking, memory and predictive ability – the specific brain area targeted for stimulation in this study was anything but random.
“We focused tDCS stimulation on the frontal lobes because this brain region has been previously implicated in mind wandering, and also because is a central locus of the executive control network that allows us to organize and plan for the future, ” Bar explains, adding that he suspected that there might be a connection between the two.
As a point of comparison and in separate experiments, the researchers used tDCS to stimulate the occipital cortex – the visual processing center in the back of the brain. They also conducted control studies where no tDCS was used.
While the self-reported incidence of mind wandering was unchanged in the case of occipital and sham stimulation, it rose considerably when this stimulation was applied to the frontal lobes. “Our results go beyond what was achieved in earlier, fMRI-based studies, ” Bar states. “They demonstrate that the frontal lobes play a causal role in the production of mind wandering behavior.”
