Zoning out

And answering questions ...

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.

Now, am I always thinking about things that are actually important when I zone out? Probably not.

Still, it’s always fascinating to learn a bit more about how the brain works.

Oh, and before you find yourself distracted all day trying to answer my personal random zone-out questions, here’s what I came up with:

• Question 1: 456,976,000.

• Question 2: 14 years, apparently.

• Question 3: Maybe this newsletter will remind me.

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7 other things worth knowing

• Las Vegas is experiencing a notable downturn in tourism, with hotel occupancy, visitor numbers and spending all slipping. Industry data points to several key reasons behind the shift, including rising costs, fewer international travellers, and broader economic uncertainties. Hotel occupancy dropped to just 66.7% in early July—a sharp fall from the previous year—and international visitor numbers plunged by more than 13% in June alone. (Yahoo Finance)

• In Yellowstone National Park, it had been roughly five years since wildlife managers had to euthanize a bear — black or grizzly — for becoming food-conditioned or habituated around humans. But that all changed this summer, after bears started getting into trouble by defeating bear-resistant food storage. (SF Gate)

• Vatican turns to ‘hot priests’ to spread faith: This week, a thousand digital missionaries and influencers from around the world met in Rome to discuss the role of social media in the church as part of the Vatican’s jubilee year. (The Telegraph)

• More than 80 percent of the Pacific nation Tuvalu's population is seeking a landmark climate visa to live in Australia as rising seas lap at its shores, official figures showed Wednesday. Australia is offering visas to Tuvalu citizens each year under a climate migration deal Canberra has billed as "the first agreement of its kind anywhere in the world." (France 24)

• Ukrainian drones targeted St. Petersburg on Sunday, Russian authorities said, forcing the airport to close for five hours as Vladimir Putin marked Russia's Navy Day in the city, despite the earlier cancellation of its naval parade due to security concerns. (Reuters)

• Student loan debt dropped millions of credit scores, affecting car affordability, but a new analysis shows that most borrowers are still making their car payments. (MarketWatch)

• These are the worst (and best) times of year to buy a used car. (Jalopnik)

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.