ArticleHuman brain mapping2019
The neural correlates of "mind blanking": When the mind goes away.
Article in Human brain mapping, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed, 45 citations in OpenAlex.
- No evidence for the impact of mind wandering on recognition associative task: an on-line preregistered study.Psychological research · 2026Article
- Forgetting or blanking? Evaluating the role of a forgot option in a thought sampling method for mind blanking research.BMC psychology · 2026Article
- Behavioral, experiential, and physiological signatures of mind blanking.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Variations of autonomic arousal mediate the reportability of mind blanking occurrences.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Dissociative experiences alter resting state functional connectivity after childhood abuse.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The Multifaceted Ganzfeld at the Crossroad Between Visual Perception and Consciousness: Behavioral, Neural and Qualitative Aspects.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Dynamical structure-function correlations provide robust and generalizable signatures of consciousness in humans.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Conscious but not thinking-Mind-blanks during visuomotor tracking: An fMRI study of endogenous attention lapses.Human brain mapping · 2024Article
- Recent advances in the neuroscience of spontaneous and off-task thought: implications for mental health.Nature. Mental health · 2023Article
- Whole-Brain Deactivations Precede Uninduced Mind-Blanking Reports.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- 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 of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Readiness to remember: predicting variability in episodic memory.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2022Review
- Overview of (f)MRI Studies of Cognitive Aging for Non-Experts: Looking through the Lens of Neuroimaging.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Review
- Is Instructional Scaffolding a Better Strategy for Teaching Writing to EFL Learners? A Functional MRI Study in Healthy Young Adults.Brain sciences · 2021Article
- The neural correlates of "mind blanking": When the mind goes away.Human brain mapping · 2019Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Mind blanking (MB) is the state where our minds are seemingly "nowhere," and attention calls no perceptual input into conscious awareness. It is little investigated, perhaps partly because it is difficult to detect the mysterious periods of blanking. In this study, we found that our participants could intentionally produce a state of MB whose neural correlates were deactivation of Broca's area and parts of the default mode network (namely, the hippocampus) which would be active during mind wandering (MW), in addition to activity in another region in the default mode network (namely, anterior cingulate cortex). Because the behavioral finding replicates a previous report of ours, we suggest that the simple instructions that we used to induce MB should be effective. From the neuroimaging data, we conclude that we cannot define the content of our thoughts during MB because our inner speech system does not work at that time. Another possibility is that we actually think of nothing in the MB state. Although more sophisticated studies would be needed to uncover the mechanism of such a phenomenon, the present study provides a methodology and clues for understanding MB and related concepts such as MW, awareness, and metacognitive ability.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.