Daydream

In which we let our minds wander (but not too far)

AI daydreams

Aah, it’s alive.

That’s the vibe I sometimes get from the recent discussions on ChatGPT or Bing AI or any of the other large language models that are good at sounding somewhat human. (That’s all it is, though.) The arguments about chatbot sentience are, in my opinion, very premature. We humans are easier to fool than we like to admit.

It got me wondering, though. What would a chatbot have to be able to do before I’d start considering that it might have some form of sentience? (Setting aside my current thoughts that true AI will need some kind of body. Sometimes, programmers tend to forget about embodied cognition.)

Then, I thought: “I’ll worry about AI sentience when it learns to daydream.” Or, from this ode to daydreaming, when an AI system has:

…thoughts and images that arise when attention drifts away from external tasks and perceptual input toward a more private, internal stream of consciousness.

So, when an ‘AI’ begins to generate without prompt, when it starts imagining things not in its training set, when it pokes its own programming and wonders about what might happen, then I’ll be impressed. (I know I’m glossing over a lot of things here, but let’s go with the flow.)

Why is daydreaming such a cool tool to have for a sentient something? It brings together a few aspects of our mental lives that play a role in how we are aware of our ‘self’ in the world. This meta-analysis finds four big ones:

• Creativity. It’s well-known that daydreaming correlates with creativity, especially with creative incubation and problem-solving (Eureka!).

• Attentional cycling. Daydreaming allows you to rotate through different information streams to advance personally meaningful goals. Perhaps especially relevant in this day of the non-stop social media barrage, but I have to think about that some more.

• Future planning. Self-reflection and imagination combine to generate potential, often autobiographical, scenarios that might help us navigate the complex social world.

• Dishabituation. Short breaks from external tasks can enhance learning and reinvigorate your mind to get going again.

The dark side

Daydreaming, however, also has a dark side.

An estimated 2.5% of people experience something called maladaptive daydreaming, or daydreaming to such an extent that it impedes their daily life.

In its more severe forms, maladaptive daydreaming can eat up over half of someone’s waking moments. There seems to be some innate ability involved since having a rich, detailed imagination can be a risk factor. (Guilty as charged.) The problems begin when that innate ability is deployed as a coping strategy. Maladaptive daydreaming often occurs alongside ADHD, anxiety, depression, and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which suggests it can be a way to escape from an unkind reality. I’ll add my own two cents here, and suggest that maladaptive daydreaming can also be a coping strategy for loneliness, something I’ve touched on before.

But even if we move beyond the more extreme cases, daydreaming is a coin with two sides. We can even see those sides in functional brain connectivity. This recent brain mapping study, for example, finds that:

… positive constructive daydreaming was positively related to CBI [Creative Behavior Inventory] scores which meant that the more daydreaming one experienced, the higher the level of creativity one had.

That’s the bright side. Here’s the dark one:

… the poor attentional control of daydreaming was negatively related to CBI scores which meant that higher scores in poor attentional control was related to lower scores in creativity performance. Daydreaming is characterized by a decoupling of attention from the current task toward unrelated concerns. Several studies have linked daydreaming to poor performance in tasks about sustained attention.

In other words, daydreaming can boost your creativity, but the price is your attention. Since that attention is very important for actually executing your creative ideas or learning new skills, you’ll have to find a balance between daydreaming and bringing those dreams into the real world.

To use myself as an example. Occasionally, I write (and even more occasionally publish) short fiction. The ideas are never the problem; I can easily daydream my way into worlds with fantastical elements that sprout dozens of story ideas in my head. The challenge is to turn those ideas into written stories. For that, I have to step out of the daydream and plunk myself in front of a keyboard. I have to weave plotlines together and thread themes through them. I have to decide which structure and voice are most suited to tell the story. I have to construct character arcs and mince motivations.

Those things do not happen during a daydream. (Although I suspect my subconscious is responsible for sudden plot resolutions and lightbulb moments.)

Sweet dreams.