ArticleFrontiers in neuroscience2019
Does the Mind Wander When the Brain Takes a Break? Local Sleep in Wakefulness, Attentional Lapses and Mind-Wandering.
Article in Frontiers in neuroscience, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 40 papers.
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Who cites it
40 citing papers in PubMed, 118 citations in OpenAlex.
- Pharmacological Manipulations of Physiological Arousal and Sleep-Like Slow Waves Modulate Sustained Attention.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2022Trial
- Lapses of attention.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Review
- Two-factor synaptic plasticity enables memory consolidation during neuronal burst firing.PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- Slow wave canonical activity deviation concept: Toward a slow wave-based EEG-fMRI reference map for health-associated network function.iScience · 2026Article
- Post-Learning Offline Pauses Support Consolidation Beyond the Mind-Wandering State.Clocks & sleep · 2026Article
- Sleep-Like Slow Waves during Wakefulness Mediate Attention and Vigilance Difficulties in Adult Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Behavioral, experiential, and physiological signatures of mind blanking.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- A bistable stochastic model quantifies performance degradation during sleep deprivation.Sleep · 2025Article
- When your heart isn't in it anymore: cardiac correlates of task disengagement.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Mind Wandering during Implicit Learning Is Associated with Increased Periodic EEG Activity and Improved Extraction of Hidden Probabilistic Patterns.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Local versus global sleep organization and the quest to determine sleep function.Neurobiology of sleep and circadian rhythms · 2025Article
- Mind wandering enhances statistical learning.iScience · 2025Article
- Variations of autonomic arousal mediate the reportability of mind blanking occurrences.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Do individuals with disorders of consciousness dream and mind wander? Implications for improving diagnosis and understanding patient wellbeing.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2025Article
- Dynamical structure-function correlations provide robust and generalizable signatures of consciousness in humans.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Behavioral and Electrophysiological Markers of Attention Fluctuations in Children with Hypersomnolence.Journal of clinical medicine · 2024Article
- Conscious but not thinking-Mind-blanks during visuomotor tracking: An fMRI study of endogenous attention lapses.Human brain mapping · 2024Article
- The presence of fear: How subjective fear, not physiological changes, shapes the experience of presence.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2024Article
- How sleep and fatigue shape statements in evidence: A psycho-legal perspective.Frontiers in cognition · 2024Article
- Rest assured: Dynamic functional connectivity and the baseline state of the human brain.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Sleep has been classically described as an all-or-nothing global phenomenon. However, recent research strongly suggests that this view requires tempering. Invasive and non-invasive recordings in animals and humans show that neural activity typically associated with sleep can locally occur during wakefulness. Although local sleep is defined neuronally, it has been associated with impaired performance during cognitive tasks. Comparatively, the phenomenology of local sleep (i.e., what it feels like when your brain is partially asleep) has been less explored. Taking into account the literature on the neuronal and behavioral profile of local sleep intrusions in wakefulness, we propose that occurrences of local sleep could represent the neural mechanism underlying many attentional lapses. In particular, we argue that a unique physiological event such as local sleep could account for a diversity of behavioral outcomes from sluggish to impulsive responses. We further propose that local sleep intrusions could impact individuals' subjective experience. Specifically, we propose that the timing and anatomical sources of local sleep intrusions could be responsible for both the behavioral consequences and subjective content of attentional lapses and may underlie the difference between subjective experiences such as mind wandering and mind blanking. Our framework aims to build a parallel between spontaneous experiences in sleep and wakefulness by integrating evidence across neuronal, behavioral and experiential levels. We use the example of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) to illustrate how local sleep could explain complex cognitive profiles which include inattention, impulsivity, mind-wandering and mind-blanking.
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