Web surfing is the new day dreaming

Who was it that said, Time you enjoy wasting is not time wasted, or something like that?

That's a nice analogy. I never really thought about it.

For myself, I wouldn't really call it dreaming, but certainly an interesting way to casually and randomly learn new things. Rather like browsing in a library.

Web surfing varies. In many cases, it is a chasing of connections and following some of those connections. I tend to think that way in the first place and am sloppy about alluding to all I've ever read, but I don't care.

I think knowledge connections are sometimes frightening or at least disconcerting and sometimes stabilizing. It's a process.

Daydreaming? There must be a trillion words out there about that.
I wouldn't equate web surfing and day dreaming, though there are aspects in common.

I believe day dreaming is an essential trait of human nature.

Web browsing is just an evolution of human nature.

Not to me. I like both.



Very productive, my learning accelerated by orders of magnitude with the internet. Studies have shown that it generates more mental activity than passive things like reading a book.



To me they are productive. I run many simulations in my head as pet daydreams, many of them end up running years. become increasingly complicated and I learn a lot from them.

For example, I build a planet or a country from scratch, and will spend 3 to 5 years thinking about every little detail (and I mean everything) till I'm done with my world building simulation and move on to a fresh start.

Right now the simulation I've been working on for the last few years involves developing teleportation and a new planet and how to develop the planet alongside earth. I've developed an electronic currency and through the control over the teleportation have a new economy that I then think about how to use to improve life on both planets (e.g. I go into details like which countries get it first, US gets a delay in favor of developing nations) I could go into infinite detail about what I've learned from the mental masturbation but I've revealed enough to look like a total dork. However, it really does teach me a lot to think about it from so many different angles. Other year-long daydreams I've had were things like building a new internet, an operating system, etc. The current one is mixing them all together into a world builder with crazy technology mixed in.

I've gained deeper insights into politics, society and all sorts of things just by thinking about them for fun. They are things that I lack the time or expertise to actually do (I haven't quite figured out teleportation yet, and lack the programming skill to make an operating sytem on my own) but I get to learn a lot by thinking about the stuff I can handle.

But I've probably driven Nick insane by talking about my operating system and teleportation dreams for the last 3 years. He just gives me the weary chuckle and gets back to whatever I'm distracting him from like nothing happened.

I guess the downside is that some might think you are crazy.

Yikes, that fits with with play thing for kids which I started a thread about and was, more importantly, part of a drew dad thread.

Crazy, isn't that a song?

I know it. I spend time just scanning several Boat sites getting ideas of new deep water crafts that Ill never be able to afford.

PS, I agree with the kid. I split a paleo class up for a project wherein they all hadda master the key indicator fossils for oil exploration. The one group could only use the web and the other group used "The Treatise of Paleontology". The students who were web connected seemed to retain the facts for a greater depth of understanding as measured in ESSAY quizes. (You cannot bullshit an essay set, wherein a straight Q/A can be marginally recalled from mental RAM

That's some righteous day dreaming, Robert!

The best thing I ever day dreamed up was the Recycling Casino.

I came up with this idea shortly after moving to Oregon. I was working (as a photographer) for a man who owned some casinos. I had just come back from a business trip to Vegas and I was gamely stuffing my cans and bottles into the stupid machine for my crappy nickle deposit back.

I hated doing the recycling. It was (still is) boring and grimey work.

At the time the Doonsebury comic was making fun of Oregon schools for their terrible underfunding (they still revisit the topic now and then).

I thought it would be totally cool if they changed the recycling machines into video poker machines or slot machines. While in Vegas I'd loved sitting and watching the amazing people who played the nickle slots and I thought, damn! that would make this recycling crap more interesting.

I dreamed that if we turned the recycling machines into gambling machines the state could win big! You lose nickle after nickle after nickle and it all adds up -- gazillions of nickles from concientious recyclers would add up in no time and the money could be used to fund the schools! Plus, once a day some random machine would spit out a winner of a couple of hundred bucks but still the state would make out like bandits.

I actually shopped the idea around a bit but blahblahblah laws say this, laws say that prevented my idea from getting off the ground.

Now I just bag my nickle back stuff seperately so the old guy with the cool bike and the great dog doesn't have to dig through my trash cans to make a couple of bucks.

I think they can be sort of similar, but nowhere near the same.

I love both.....web surfing is a bit like day-dreaming, because it is often associative...you know, when you see something that piques your interest, then in reading about that, you become interested in something else (I actually had a thread about that process, thanking the techies who made it possible), and so on, until you find yourself miles from where you began, and having learned and enjoyed a heap of stuff on the way.

But I think it way more cognitive (although guided to some extent by unconscious processes, I suppose).

I think day-dreaming is far more an unconscious process...with the cognitive bits as the tip of the iceberg, of course...and far more emotionally than intellectually satisfying.


Though, of course, reverie often begins with a cognitive push, and there is a lot of cognitive processes going along.

I guess one, to me, is like wandering a city, and the other more like floating down a stream.

I think both are great, and neither a waste of time...unless they are all you do, or are done when you are putting off tackling an important task.

I suspect both tap into the crucial "alert wakefulness" state of our baby brains, and that a great deal of learning and sorting and reflecting is done during these activities.

Reflective capacity is a key marker and creator of emotional and cognitive health.

I just realized it's also connected to the internet for me. For example when I asked about mosquitoes and whether they serve a positive ecological role I was trying to decide whether the most dangerous animal to humans was going to have a place on my fantasy planet.

They didn't make the cut.



I love it! Use a variable schedule of reinforcement and you get mad recycling.

Now I'm already fantasizing about this one, I'd lose the whole part about trying to fund schools with it and try to just encourage more recycling. Instead of giving people a nickel for their can they gamble it and hope to win more. Would spur more recycling....

Absolutely love this idea!

Just to confound my theory!!!

The ultimate cognitive day-dreamer.

The discussion we had about prison islands was also part of my world builder. That one, despite your best arguments, actually did make the cut. But it's a set of prison planets (one male, one female).

This daydream's been going on for years now, I need a new one.

Yes...I figured that. You've talked about that for years, and mentioned the prison exile thing for years, too.

New one?

Sounds like a long term one.

But maybe it's time for a Lilliputian day dream, then.