Quite possibly the best news I’ve heard in a long, long time.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Science (phew) did a little study and it went something like this: researchers got a few people to together and sat them in front of a few computer screens. They then asked them to press a button whenever a certain letter appeared on the screen, while showing them other unrelated images. And they made sure to ask them whether or not they were concentrating exclusively on the task at hand, or whether they were thinking about other things.

See, we all have this thing called working memory, and it’s good for remembering the little things— like how much change you owe while scraping through your coin purse or an address while you search for a pen and paper. What the researchers found was that people with lareger working memory capacity reported that they daydreamed more. So when someone with an extensive working memory is doing a menial, easy task, they employ that extra memory they have lying around to think about other, unrelated things. Pretty cool, huh?

And apparently, working memory predicts intelligence in a way similar to an IQ test. Daydream away, you Lovely brainiacs. [via Gizmodo]

Do you find yourself daydreaming while doing other things?