Daydreams = Thought Experiments

The daydreamers of the world are a special sort. Perhaps I'm jaded since I am one, but I was just daydreaming about daydreaming, and it occurred to me that to many people, the word "daydream" has negative connotations. Even to me, it brings up images of listless know-nothings who bumble through life in spite of themselves. It seems worth mentioning because, I remember how much grief I used to get as a kid for being a daydreamer.

As a 15-year old "child" daydreaming was a source of consternation for parents and teachers alike. There was no appreciation of daydreaming as the important reasoning skill it truly is. As a 34.9 year-old "adult" I know the true power of a strong imagination, and that's the power that daydreams give you.

Albert Einstein knew that, he was famous for his daydreams. When Einstein had daydreams, people called them "thought experiments", but they were daydreams nonetheless. They may have been very well informed daydreams, but in the end, it was still just a really well educated and creative man using his imagination to perform a set of tasks or to simulate a hypothetical event.

The mind is a fantastic parallel computer by any standard, and those who know how to use it to perform mental simulations benefit in much the same way an a scientist benefits when he uses a supercomputer to perform a simulation. Certainly, these mental simulations are not as testable, verifiable, or repeatable as their computer-driven counterparts, but given the ease with which some people can perform mental simulations, there's certainly a lot of bang for the buck. This economy of time and resources makes them very useful for certain types of experiments that, for whatever reason, could not be done another way (eg: light rays being bent by the curvature of space, a theory that could not be tested until many years after it was imagined in one of Einstein's thought experiments).

Of course, all the imagination in the world won't help you at all if your head is filled with nonsense, lies and other forms of non-facts, which is why a thorough and broad education based on actual fact is still essential (I could digress here about conservative Christians and other forms of Bush voters, but I'm trying to turn over a new leaf with regards to meandering posts...yes I'm talking about you, you bible-stroking fucktards).

What I'm suggesting is simple. If you have a child (or adult) who likes to daydream, rather than discouraging it, maybe you should let them perfect their skills while encouraging them to apply that skill to the task at hand, such as their classwork, rather than treating them like they are doing something wrong. Daydreaming is thought experimentation, and experimentation is after all, what education is all about.