ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
Mind blanking is a distinct mental state linked to a recurrent brain profile of globally positive connectivity during ongoing mentation.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed.
- No evidence for the impact of mind wandering on recognition associative task: an on-line preregistered study.Psychological research · 2026Article
- In-scanner thoughts contribute to resting-state functional connectivity.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Forgetting or blanking? Evaluating the role of a forgot option in a thought sampling method for mind blanking research.BMC psychology · 2026Article
- Phenomenology of the stream of thought: dissociable dynamic dimensions revealed through experience sampling.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2026Article
- Brain network dynamics in the wake-sleep transition reorganize according to task engagement.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- Behavioral, experiential, and physiological signatures of mind blanking.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Transcranial direct current stimulation modulates primate brain dynamics across states of consciousness.eLife · 2025Article
- Variations of autonomic arousal mediate the reportability of mind blanking occurrences.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Metastability demystified - the foundational past, the pragmatic present and the promising future.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2025Review
- Altered brain state dynamics between preterm and term-born infants.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 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
- Distinct dynamic connectivity profiles promote enhanced conscious perception of auditory stimuli.Communications biology · 2024Article
- In-Scanner Thoughts shape Resting-state Functional Connectivity: how participants "rest" matters.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- The epileptic blip syndrome.Epilepsy & behavior reports · 2024Article
- Julearn: an easy-to-use library for leakage-free evaluation and inspection of ML models.GigaByte (Hong Kong, China) · 2024Article
- Experience sampling reveals the role that covert goal states play in task-relevant behavior.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- 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
- Why is everyone talking about brain state?Trends in neurosciences · 2023Review
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Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Mind blanking (MB) is a waking state during which we do not report any mental content. The phenomenology of MB challenges the view of a constantly thinking mind. Here, we comprehensively characterize the MB's neurobehavioral profile with the aim to delineate its role during ongoing mentation. Using functional MRI experience sampling, we show that the reportability of MB is less frequent, faster, and with lower transitional dynamics than other mental states, pointing to its role as a transient mental relay. Regarding its neural underpinnings, we observed higher global signal amplitude during MB reports, indicating a distinct physiological state. Using the time-varying functional connectome, we show that MB reports can be classified with high accuracy, suggesting that MB has a unique neural composition. Indeed, a pattern of global positive-phase coherence shows the highest similarity to the connectivity patterns associated with MB reports. We interpret this pattern's rigid signal architecture as hindering content reportability due to the brain's inability to differentiate signals in an informative way. Collectively, we show that MB has a unique neurobehavioral profile, indicating that nonreportable mental events can happen during wakefulness. Our results add to the characterization of spontaneous mentation and pave the way for more mechanistic investigations of MB's phenomenology.
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