Daydreams of Foreign Travel Prove Most Transporting

Need some escape from, say, a tedious meeting or a fight with your spouse? Let your mind drift off to a long-ago foreign vacation, suggest a new study, and the world around you will literally slip away.

The farther away your daydreams take you, in both distance and time, the study found, the more you'll forget about what you're doing right now. It's the first study to show that traveling purely in the mind can affect memory as much as real changes in space and time do. The findings might help people intentionally alter their own memories.

"There are all kinds of times we want to take ourselves away from what we are doing or what we have just been doing," said Peter Delaney, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. "If you think back to an international vacation, specifically one that happened a long time ago, you should be able to put it out of your mind and feel a little fresher again."

Until about a decade ago, psychologists doubted that people could actively forget things. In the popular example of a white bear or pink elephant, for example, trying not to think about an unusual and concrete object is the surest way to make that image stick in your mind.

Then in 2000, a study found that, with effort, people could forget words that they had memorized. When scientists asked people how they had managed to forget, they said they had simply thought about something else.

To find out which kinds of thoughts most effectively lead to forgetting, Delaney and colleagues challenged more than 200 college students to memorize lists of words. Then, the scientists told the students either do some unrelated task or to engage in a specific kind of daydream.

Results, published in the journal Psychological Science, showed that students who were told to think about their parents' homes forgot more of the memorized words compared to students who had thought about their own, much closer homes or to those who did some other task. The longer it had been since they'd been to their old homes, the more words they forgot.

The study also found that students who imagined a recent international vacation forgot more words than did students who imaged a recent domestic vacation. As in the first experiment, more words slipped away with greater distances traveled.

The findings suggest that directed daydreaming might help people intentionally block unpleasant thoughts and events -- even if they already happened, said Robert A. Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

"People have been painfully aware that when you get into daydreaming, you stop paying attention, and that when something suddenly wakes you up, you realize you don't know what's been going on while you were daydreaming," he said. "The new angle here is that a period like that will not only largely eliminate the learning you might have done, but will impair access to what happened before you started daydreaming."

Forgetting is an essential and complicated process, Bjork pointed out. Our minds would be far too cluttered if we could immediately remember every phone number we've ever had and every fact we've ever learned.

Daydreaming might play an important role, too, he added. Other studies have shown that daydreaming helps people remember what happens after they snap back to reality.

"Forgetting things that might compete from the past can help you in new learning situations," Bjork said. "It's a kind of trade off."