Getting caught muttering to yourself in an empty room or staring blankly out of the window can make you feel like a bit of an idiot.
We’re brought up to think that drifting off means you’re lazy or just can’t focus on the job at hand. But brain experts have been digging into what’s actually happening when our attention slips, and it’s great news for anyone who struggles to stay on track. A mind that constantly wanders is often just running on a higher gear, as it turns out. Far from being a flaw, these quirky habits usually mean your brain has a massive amount of spare power to burn.
Intelligence doesn’t always look the way we’re taught to expect.
Most of us picture intelligence as someone sharp, quick on their feet, decisive, and slick in conversation. The film version of a smart person is someone who answers fast, has strong opinions, and never seems flustered. The reality, according to psychologist Mark Travers writing in Forbes, is rather different. People with higher cognitive ability often have minds that are slower, busier, and more conflicted than the people around them, not because they’re struggling, but because they’re processing more underneath the surface.
Travers argues that some of the habits we tell people off for, or that we feel a bit embarrassed about ourselves, are actually signs that the brain doing them is unusually active. Two of the most misunderstood are daydreaming and talking to yourself, both of which look unproductive on the outside and turn out to be anything but.
The first habit: daydreaming
If you’re someone who finds your mind drifting off mid-conversation, staring out the window during meetings, or constructing elaborate hypothetical scenarios in your head while you’re meant to be doing something else, you’ve probably been told off for it at some point. Daydreaming has long been seen as a sign of not paying attention, being lazy, or having your head in the clouds. However, the research is increasingly pointing the other way.
A 2025 study of 1,300 adults used neuroimaging to look at what’s actually happening in the brain when people daydream, and found increased connectivity between the parts of the brain responsible for executive control and the default mode network, which handles imagination and self-generated thought. In plain English, daydreaming brains aren’t switched off, they’re running a more advanced version of thinking that links creative imagination with focused attention.
Why daydreaming is linked to creativity
The same study found that daydreaming actually predicted higher creative performance, but only in people who allowed themselves to do it freely without trying to clamp it down. People who fight their daydreaming, push the wandering thoughts away, and force themselves to stay on task tend to lose the very thing that makes their brain work well in the first place.
The reason has to do with how creative ideas form. New connections between concepts don’t usually happen when you’re staring straight at a problem, they happen when your mind is wandering and the brain has the freedom to rummage around in stored knowledge. Daydreaming is essentially the brain’s way of letting that rummaging happen. The classic shower-thought phenomenon, where good ideas pop up when you’re not concentrating, is exactly this in action.
The second habit: talking to yourself
Catching yourself muttering through a problem, narrating what you’re doing while you cook, or talking yourself through a tricky decision out loud is the kind of thing that makes people feel a bit self-conscious if they’re caught at it. There’s still a lingering idea that talking to yourself is a sign of being a bit odd. Psychologists call it private speech, and research consistently links it to advanced cognitive function rather than anything to worry about.
When someone talks through a problem out loud, they’re doing what’s called externalising their thinking, which makes it easier to spot gaps in logic, hold more information in working memory, and audit their own reasoning as they go. The habit often shows up in gifted children and stays with them into adulthood, where it acts as a little tool for working through complicated problems.
Why talking to yourself works
The science behind it has to do with metacognition, which is just a fancy word for thinking about your own thinking. Saying things out loud forces your brain to slow down and structure your reasoning in a way that silent thinking doesn’t always require. It’s why people muttering away at a maths problem, walking themselves through a recipe, or rehearsing a tough conversation often arrive at better answers than people who try to do it all silently in their heads.
A 2024 study confirmed that the brain is genuinely active during this process, working harder rather than zoning out. So next time you catch yourself talking through your shopping list at the corner shop, you can secretly congratulate yourself on running an advanced bit of cognitive software.
There’s a reason these habits frustrate other people.
Both habits get on people’s nerves, which is partly why they’ve been labelled as bad. A daydreamer in a meeting can come across as not listening, even when they’re actually processing what’s being said in their own way. Someone who talks to themselves can seem distracted or strange, even when they’re working through something complicated.
The habits look inefficient from the outside, which makes them easy targets for criticism, especially in school or workplace environments that prize visible, structured productivity. The trouble is that this criticism often pushes people to suppress the very habits that make their thinking work, which can leave them feeling slower, less creative, and less themselves.
The double-edged sword of being a busy thinker
Travers points out that intelligence doesn’t always look smooth, and that highly intelligent people are often misunderstood because their mental habits don’t fit the polished image of cleverness. The same brain that wanders off into rich daydreams can also struggle to stay present in dull meetings. The same brain that talks itself through tricky problems can come across as a bit eccentric in a quiet office.
Both habits come with social costs, and Travers is careful not to romanticise them. The point isn’t that everyone who daydreams or talks to themselves is a genius, just that these aren’t the lazy or odd habits they’ve been made out to be. They’re often signs of a brain doing what it’s best at, even if it doesn’t always look that way.
Other subtle markers of intelligence worth knowing about
While Travers focuses on these two habits, other research has pointed to a handful of related traits that often show up in highly intelligent people. A high tolerance for ambiguity is one, where someone is comfortable saying “I don’t know” and sitting with uncertainty rather than rushing to a tidy answer. A low need for cognitive closure is another, where people are happy to hold contradictory ideas at the same time while they weigh things up.
Many highly intelligent people are also night owls, with their thinking peaking late in the evening rather than first thing in the morning, which can make traditional 9-to-5 schedules tough on them. None of these are universal, but they crop up often enough to be worth knowing about.
What this means for the rest of us
The most useful thing about all of this isn’t really about working out whether you’re clever or not. It’s about being a bit kinder to your own brain. If you’re someone who drifts off into daydreams, mutters to yourself through problems, holds two contradictory thoughts at once, or takes longer than the people around you to land on a decision, none of those are flaws to be fixed. They’re often the signs of a brain that’s doing more under the bonnet, not less.
The same goes for the people in your life. The colleague who seems vague in meetings might be the one who comes back with the genuinely original idea. The friend who mutters their way through a recipe might also be the one who solves the problem nobody else could untangle.
Cleverness has been packaged for years as something polished, fast, and confident-looking, and the reality is rarely that neat. The habits that get labelled as annoying, distracted, or odd are often the very things keeping a sharp brain ticking over. So if you spend half your day staring out the window or murmuring under your breath at the kettle, take it as a compliment. Your brain is probably doing exactly what it’s meant to be doing.
