Remembering to Forget: The Amnesic Effect of Daydreaming

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/07/100726124424.htm
                According to this article, when you are daydreaming or mind-wandering, it’s hard to remember what was going on just before you stopped paying attention. Now psychologists have found that the effect is stronger when your mind drifts farther, such as memories of a trip u went to when you are in kindergarten instead of a trip u went to just last summer. Previous studies have also discovered that daydreaming or mind-wandering about something else blocks your access to memories of the recent past. Psychological scientists did experiments to confirm it. For one of the experiments, each participant looked at a list of words, then they were told to either recall about where they’ve been this morning or about where they haven’t been in several weeks. Finally, they were shown to a second list of words, and at the end of the test, they were told to recall as many of the words they can remember from the two lists as possible. Participants who had thought about the place they’ve been just a few hours ago remembered more of the words from the first list than participants who had thought back several weeks ago. A second experiment was test, and the same was true for memories about place. Those who thought about a vacation within the United States remembered more words than those who thought about a vacation in another country.


                This article relates to science/biology concepts since it’s talking about psychology, and how daydreaming and mind-wandering about memory in the more distant past have a stronger effect to forgetting about what was just going on. This article is basically about the study of the human mind and how it works when you recall memories. For example: when you are in class and suddenly you start daydreaming about the cruise trip you had a few years ago, then you’ll probably have a lot of trouble thinking about what the teacher was just saying before you started daydreaming. This topic is proven by the experiments the psychological scientists did.

                This information was put in the newspaper because we are concerned about the effect of daydreaming and mind-wandering, especially when we are in a boring class. We might already know the effect of daydreaming without noticing because everyone has at least daydreamed or mind-wandered once or twice in class. We care because we wouldn’t want to do that on an important event, such as a lecture or during your graduation. In the article, it also says that it might be for people who want to forget about something, like maybe a bad experience or memory, and try to put it out of your mind for awhile by recalling a more distant event than a close event.