** From a study on:
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David Robson is a freelance writer based in London. He is @d_a_robson on Twitter.
This article was originally published on
February 12, 2018, by BBC Future, and is republished here with
permission.
In each case, the researchers simply asked the participants to sit in a dim, quiet room, without their mobile phones or similar distractions. “We don’t give them any specific instructions with regards to what they should or shouldn’t do while resting,” Dewar says. “But questionnaires completed at the end of our experiments
suggest that most people simply let their minds wander.”
Even then, we should be careful not to exert ourselves too hard as we daydream. In one study,
for instance, participants were asked to imagine a past or future event during their break, which appeared to reduce their later recall of the newly learned material. So it may be safest to avoid any concerted mental effort during our downtime.
The exact mechanism is still unknown, though some clues come from a growing understanding of memory formation. It is
now well accepted that once memories are initially encoded, they pass
through a period of consolidation that cements them in long-term
storage. This was once thought to happen primarily during sleep, with heightened communication between the hippocampus – where memories are first formed – and the cortex, a process that may build and strengthen the new neural connections that are necessary for later recall.
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