ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2025
Behavioral, experiential, and physiological signatures of mind blanking.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 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
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- The "Feeling" of inattention: ADHD symptoms and mind wandering beyond remembered thought content.Psychological research · 2026Article
- Behavioral, experiential, and physiological signatures of mind blanking.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 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
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Does being awake necessarily mean being conscious of something? This study investigates the phenomenon of mind blanking (MB), characterized by an "emptiness of mind," comparing it with mind wandering (MW) and on-task (ON) states. Using a sustained attention task and electroencephalogram monitoring, behavioral, and neurophysiological signatures of MB were examined in 62 participants. MB exhibited a specific pattern of behavioral lapses, as well as decreased fast oscillatory activity and complexity over posterior electrodes compared to MW. Functional connectivity analyses revealed decreased long-range interareal connectivity during MB, compared to both ON and MW states. Event-related potentials with source reconstruction and temporal decoding techniques indicated a significant disruption in visual processing during MB, starting from 200 ms post stimulus and echoing into the late-stage of visual processing, suggesting a disruption of conscious access to sensory information during MB. Electroencephalogram-derived markers allowed the prediction of mental states at the trial level, offering a finer view of conscious dynamics than subjective reports alone. Overall, these findings challenge the notion of the wakeful conscious mind as inherently content-oriented, suggesting that MB reflects genuine gaps in the stream of conscious thoughts, arising from disruptions in the generation or accessibility of thought content.
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Registered trials
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