What is it about?
We generally consider that our mind is full of thoughts when we are awake. Like a river stream always running, we also entertain our own dynamic mental stream: a thought can lead to another, relevant to what we do or not, ebbing between our inner life and the outer environment. How can the brain sustain such a thought-related mode constantly, though? Our work indicates that it cannot, and that our brains also need to “go offline” for some moments, which we experience as blanks in the mind.
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Why is it important?
Mind blanking is a relatively new mental state within the study of spontaneous cognition. It opens exciting avenues about the underlying biological mechanisms that happen during waking life. It might be that the boundaries of sleep and wakefulness might not be that discrete as they appear to be after all. Critically, the rapidly changing brain activity requires robust analysis methods to confirm the specific signature of this mental state. In this work, behavioural and brain data are approached beyond standard correlation analysis and, by means of supervised and unsupervised machine learning techniques, we were able to determine a unique cerebro-functional profile of mind blanking for the first time.
Perspectives
The fascinating thing about mind blanking for me is that the brain needs its own "pauses" during wakefulness, which is not evident from what we experience in general, that is "being there". I also find that understanding mind blanking also exonerates us from the social pressure that we always need to look engaged. If this is a matter of brain function, we can only feel that much guilty for it.
Athena Demertzi
Cyclotron Research Center, GIGA Institute, University of Liège
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Mind blanking is a distinct mental state linked to a recurrent brain profile of globally positive connectivity during ongoing mentation, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, October 2022, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2200511119.
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