Neuroscience Says This Is What Happens to Your Brain When You Zone Out
By Bill Murphy Jr.
A fun thing for my wife to do sometimes is to catch me zoning out, and then ask what random thing I was thinking about without realizing it. Real-life examples:
Ontario license plates have four letters followed by three numbers. What is the maximum number of letter/number combinations possible as a result?
What’s the minimum time that should pass between a hit song doing well and another song that samples the first song (like “Somebody That I Used to Know” by Gotye and Kimbra, 2011, and “Anxiety” by rapper and singer Doechii, 2025)?
Next year on April Fool’s Day, how can I make sure I don’t forget to order a giant, fake, “Coming Soon: In-N-Out Burger!” banner and post it on one of the vacant storefronts in my New Jersey town?
Now, a new study published by HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus says there might be much more going on when you daydream or zone out than you realize.
‘Entirely possible’
Writing in the journal Nature, Janelia Group Leader Marius Pachitariu, who holds a Ph.D. in computational neuroscience, and coauthors say they performed experiments in which they tracked the brains of mice during different kinds of experiments.
The mice ran in “linear virtual reality corridors” that simulated real-world environments — sometimes rewarded with food, and other times not rewarded at all.
Once the mice learned the rules of each experiment, the researchers changed them subtly, so that they had to learn about a new environment.
While the researchers set out to track the neurons in the mice’s brains as they learned the new rules — a total of 90,000 neurons simultaneously, which was a very significant challenge — they wrote that they were perplexed as they sought to explain much of the brain activity even when the mice were not adapting to a new environment.
“As we thought more and more about it, we eventually ended up on the question of whether the task itself was even necessary,” Pachitariu explained. “It’s entirely possible that a lot of the plasticity happens just basically with the animal’s own exploration of the environment.”
‘Don’t need a teacher’
From there, they expanded the experiments simply to track the mice’s brains while they were allowed to explore the environment on their own.
They found that certain areas of the mice’s visual cortices were being used and absorbing information regardless of whether there were tasks and rewards involved — a sort of “unsupervised learning.”
Moreover, mice that were left to explore the environment on their own wound up much more able to connect various parts of the habitat with rewards than mice that explored only when they were being trained on a specific task.
“It means that you don’t always need a teacher to teach you: You can still learn about your environment unconsciously, and this kind of learning can prepare you for the future,” added co-author Lin Zhong, an HHMI neuroscientist. “I was very surprised. I have been doing behavioral experiments since my PhD, and I never expected that without training mice to do a task, you will find the same neuroplasticity.”
‘More important questions in your life’
We’ve seen before that even if some of your zoning out and daydreaming doesn’t really seem all that productive, allowing your mind to wander can have real benefits.
A 2023 study in Nature Reviews Psychology found that what they call “offline waking rest” is critical to deep thinking, because it allows memory consolidation to happen without interruption.
Cognitive scientist Todd Kashdan calls zoning out “the incubation period of creativity.”
And, a team of Harvard psychologists theorized that human beings spend nearly half of their waking hours with their minds wandering and their zoning out behaviors engaged.
“When you daydream, you may not be achieving your immediate goal — say reading a book or paying attention in class — but your mind may be taking that time to address more important questions in your life,” explained researcher Kalina Christoff, as reported by my colleague Peter Economy.