“A wandering mind is an unhappy mind,” declared Killingsworth & Gilbert.
And reader, to borrow a phrase from Michael Jordan: I took it personally.
I’m a creativity researcher who has spent years studying the upside of the wandering mind—positive-constructive daydreaming: the playful, future-oriented inner life that fuels imagination and insight. And Jerome L. Singer, the “father of daydreaming” who pioneered that whole line of work, became a close personal friend and sat on my dissertation committee. He is, I’m quite sure, rolling in his grave every time he hears a mindfulness researcher hate on the cognitive machinery behind daydreaming.
They’ve got the wrong villain.
Meet the accused
The “default mode network” is the system that’s most active when you turn inward—when you stop chasing an external goal and start to drift, remember, imagine, reflect, and wonder. I’ve spent my career arguing the exact opposite, which is why I call it the Imagination Network: because what it’s doing is anything but nothing!
Here’s the résumé of the accused:
- It writes your story. It builds your autobiographical memory—the running internal narrative that makes you you across time.
- It travels through time. It lets you imagine your future self, rehearse your goals, and run the “what if” scenarios that planning a life requires.
- It reads other minds. It’s the seat of perspective-taking, empathy, and theory of mind.
- It incubates your best ideas—and powers creative flow.
These are not idle defaults or bugs to be patched out. They are the soul of human existence! They are, in the most literal sense, essential to self-actualization itself.
And here’s the part the mindfulness researchers keep missing: the network they smear as the self-absorbed “me” network is also the “us” network. It’s how we connect—and how we love.
That is not the résumé of a villain. That’s the résumé of the most human part of the human brain.
The real culprit was never the network
So why does the network keep showing up at the scene of every crime? Because it also hosts rumination—the stuck, self-attacking loop where the same dark thought circles the drain.
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