Mind-wandering as creative thinking: neural, psychological, and theoretical considerations

Creative thinking is understood via a dual-process model involving the generation of creative ideas followed by their subsequent evaluation and refinement. Creative products must also meet a dual-criterion definition requiring that they be both novel and useful. Mind-wandering consists of self-generated thoughts unrelated to a task or the surrounding environment, involving a relatively spontaneous generation stage sometimes (but not always) followed by a more deliberate stage in which thoughts are evaluated and reflected upon. These stages of mind-wandering show brain recruitment similar to the equivalent stages of creative thinking, and moreover, much mind-wandering can be considered novel and useful. We aim to show that there is a profound analogy—perhaps even a direct relationship—between mind-wandering and creative thinking.