ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2021
Out of the blue: understanding abrupt and wayward transitions in thought using probability and predictive processing.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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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.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Frequency-Specific Neural Dynamics and Decoding of Hierarchical Auditory Sequences Revealed by Magnetoencephalography.Neuroscience bulletin · 2026Article
- Neural dynamics of spontaneous memory recall and future thinking in the continuous flow of thoughts.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Prefrontal contributions to the stability and variability of thought and conscious experience.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2022Review
- Constructive episodic simulation in dreams.PloS one · 2022Article
- Offline perception: an introduction.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Thoughts that appear to come to us 'out of the blue' or 'out of nowhere' are a familiar aspect of mental experience. Such thoughts tend to elicit feelings of surprise and spontaneity. Although we are beginning to understand the neural processes that underlie the arising of such thoughts, little is known about what accounts for their peculiar phenomenology. Here, we focus on one central aspect of this phenomenology-the experience of surprise at their occurrence, as it relates to internal probabilistic predictions regarding mental states. We introduce a distinction between two phenomenologically different types of transitions in thought content: (i)
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