Watching the brain while daydreaming

This idea of structured daydreaming may have some validity. In offering some advice on how to become more creative, Anne Kreamer suggests that we let our minds wander. She offers a link to a recent paper in PNAS that describes the results of experiments using functional MRI brain imaging to determine which areas of the brain are active when we're concentrating on a task and which regions light up when our mind wanders. They observe activity in both the "executive" (controlled thinking) and "default" (automatic thinking) networks. As activation of the executive network typically represses activity in the default network, daydreaming may create a state in the brain that is particularly well-suited to creative thinking. This parallel recruitment of the two networks

"is reminiscent of the neural recruitment observed during creative thinking, where executive regions and default regions are activated before solving problems with insight...Thus, mind wandering may be part of a larger class of mental phenomena that enable executive processes to occur without diminishing the potential contribution of the default network for creative thought."

The essence of staying loose is letting the random process of idea generation occur while paying enough attention to record the ideas but not being so actively engaged to inhibit idea generation.