ArticleJournal of cognitive neuroscience2017
The Phenomenal Contents and Neural Correlates of Spontaneous Thoughts across Wakefulness, NREM Sleep, and REM Sleep.
Article in Journal of cognitive neuroscience, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
27 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Influencing dreams through sensory stimulation: A systematic review.Sleep medicine reviews · 2024Pooled it
- Review
- From living metaphors in impactful dreams to sublime disquietude and sublime enthrallment.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- The cathartic dream: Using a large language model to study a new type of functional dream in healthy and clinical populations.Journal of sleep research · 2025Article
- Acute REM sleep deprivation alleviated depression-like behavior mediated by inhibiting VIP neurons in the mPFC.Science advances · 2025Article
- Dreaming conundrum.Journal of sleep research · 2025Review
- Variations of autonomic arousal mediate the reportability of mind blanking occurrences.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Revolutionizing Sleep Science: A Narrative Review of the Historical Origins and Current Applications of Sleep Neuroimaging.Nature and science of sleep · 2025Review
- Hippocampal sharp-wave ripples correlate with periods of naturally occurring self-generated thoughts in humans.Nature communications · 2024Article
- The Epistemic Limits of Impactful Dreams: Metacognition, Metaphoricity, and Sublime Feeling.Brain sciences · 2024Review
- Consciousness and sleep.Neuron · 2024Review
- Neuropsychopharmacological Induction of (Lucid) Dreams: A Narrative Review.Brain sciences · 2024Review
- Targeted dream incubation at a distance: the development of a remote and sensor-free tool for incubating hypnagogic dreams and mind-wandering.Frontiers in sleep · 2024Article
- Dreams share phenomenological similarities with task-unrelated thoughts and relate to variation in trait rumination and COVID-19 concern.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Episodic thought distinguishes spontaneous cognition in waking from REM and NREM sleep.Consciousness and cognition · 2022Article
- Predicting lapses of attention with sleep-like slow waves.Nature communications · 2021Article
- Offline perception: an introduction.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- How deep is the rift between conscious states in sleep and wakefulness? Spontaneous experience over the sleep-wake cycle.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Hallucinations as intensified forms of mind-wandering.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- EEG microstates of dreams.Scientific reports · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Thoughts occur during wake as well as during dreaming sleep. Using experience sampling combined with high-density EEG, we investigated the phenomenal qualities and neural correlates of spontaneously occurring thoughts across wakefulness, non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, and REM sleep. Across all states, thoughts were associated with activation of a region of the midcingulate cortex. Thoughts during wakefulness additionally involved a medial prefrontal region, which was associated with metacognitive thoughts during wake. Phenomenologically, waking thoughts had more metacognitive content than thoughts during both NREM and REM sleep, whereas thoughts during REM sleep had a more social content. Together, these results point to a core neural substrate for thoughts, regardless of behavioral state, within the midcingulate cortex, and suggest that medial prefrontal regions may contribute to metacognitive content in waking thoughts.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.