Put down the phone for a minute. Daydreaming may make your more socially adept (Scientific American).
When our brains are not otherwise occupied, a network of neural regions called the default mode network automatically comes online. It enables us to turn our attention inward and daydream, but it also helps us to project out and put ourselves in other people’s shoes.
“One of the main reasons—or adaptive potentials—to take breaks, even short breaks throughout our day-to-day life, is to help us retain information longer and transfer it into long-term memory,” Andrews-Hanna notes. “The Meyer study is the first to extend these findings to social information and our memory of other people.”
A couple of reports on earlier daydreaming research: