scholarly journals Wandering minds, sleepy brains: lapses of attention and local sleep in wakefulness

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Andrillon ◽  
Angus Burns ◽  
Teigane Mackay ◽  
Jennifer Windt ◽  
Naotsugu Tsuchiya
Keyword(s):  
Neural Activity ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Mind Wandering ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Cognitive Profiles ◽  
Stream Of Consciousness ◽  
Impact Performance ◽  
Attentional Lapses ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Local Sleep

Abstract Attentional lapses are ubiquitous and can negatively impact performance. They correlate with mind wandering, or thoughts that are unrelated to ongoing tasks and environmental demands. In other cases, the stream of consciousness itself comes to a halt and the mind goes blank. What happens in the brain that leads to these mental states? To understand the neural mechanisms underlying attentional lapses, we cross-analyzed the behavior, subjective experience and neural activity of healthy participants performing a task. Random interruptions prompted participants to indicate whether they were task-focused, mind-wandering or mind-blanking. High-density electroencephalography revealed the occurrence of spatially and temporally localized sleep-like patterns of neural activity. This “local sleep” accompanied behavioral markers of lapses and preceded reports of mind wandering and mind blanking. Furthermore, the location of local sleep distinguished sluggish versus impulsive behaviors, mind wandering versus mind blanking. Despite contrasting cognitive profiles, attentional lapses could share a common physiological origin: the appearance of local islets of sleep within the awake brain.

scholarly journals Wandering minds, sleepy brains: lapses of attention and local sleep in wakefulness

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Andrillon ◽  
Angus Burns ◽  
Teigane MacKay ◽  
Jennifer Windt ◽  
Naotsugu Tsuchiya
Keyword(s):  
Neural Activity ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Mind Wandering ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Cognitive Profiles ◽  
Stream Of Consciousness ◽  
Impact Performance ◽  
Attentional Lapses ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Local Sleep

AbstractAttentional lapses are ubiquitous and can negatively impact performance. They correlate with mind wandering, or thoughts that are unrelated to ongoing tasks and environmental demands. In other cases, the stream of consciousness itself comes to a halt and the mind goes blank. What happens in the brain that leads to these mental states? To understand the neural mechanisms underlying attentional lapses, we cross-analyzed the behavior, subjective experience and neural activity of healthy participants performing a task. Random interruptions prompted participants to indicate whether they were task-focused, mind-wandering or mind-blanking. High-density electroencephalography revealed the occurrence of spatially and temporally localized sleep-like patterns of neural activity. This “local sleep” accompanied behavioral markers of lapses and preceded reports of mind wandering and mind blanking. Furthermore, the location of local sleep distinguished sluggish versus impulsive behaviors, mind wandering versus mind blanking. Despite contrasting cognitive profiles, attentional lapses could share a common physiological origin: the appearance of local islets of sleep within the awake brain.

scholarly journals Predicting lapses of attention with sleep-like slow waves

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Andrillon ◽  
Angus Burns ◽  
Teigane Mackay ◽  
Jennifer Windt ◽  
Naotsugu Tsuchiya
Keyword(s):  
Neural Activity ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Mind Wandering ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Slow Waves ◽  
Neural Mechanisms ◽  
Stream Of Consciousness ◽  
Attentional Lapses ◽  
Healthy Participants ◽  
Local Sleep

AbstractAttentional lapses occur commonly and are associated with mind wandering, where focus is turned to thoughts unrelated to ongoing tasks and environmental demands, or mind blanking, where the stream of consciousness itself comes to a halt. To understand the neural mechanisms underlying attentional lapses, we studied the behaviour, subjective experience and neural activity of healthy participants performing a task. Random interruptions prompted participants to indicate their mental states as task-focused, mind-wandering or mind-blanking. Using high-density electroencephalography, we report here that spatially and temporally localized slow waves, a pattern of neural activity characteristic of the transition toward sleep, accompany behavioural markers of lapses and preceded reports of mind wandering and mind blanking. The location of slow waves could distinguish between sluggish and impulsive behaviours, and between mind wandering and mind blanking. Our results suggest attentional lapses share a common physiological origin: the emergence of local sleep-like activity within the awake brain.

scholarly journals Does the mind wander when the brain takes a break? Local sleep in wakefulness, attentional lapses and mind-wandering

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Andrillon ◽  
Jennifer Windt ◽  
Tim Silk ◽  
Sean Drummond ◽  
Mark Bellgrove ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Neural Mechanism ◽  
Mind Wandering ◽  
Subjective Experiences ◽  
Impaired Performance ◽  
Behavioural Profile ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Attentional Lapses ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Local Sleep

Sleep has been classically described as an all-or-nothing global phenomenon. However, recent research 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 behavioural 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 behavioural 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 behavioural 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, behavioural 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.

scholarly journals Does the Mind Wander When the Brain Takes a Break? Local Sleep in Wakefulness, Attentional Lapses and Mind-Wandering

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Andrillon ◽  
Jennifer Windt ◽  
Tim Silk ◽  
Sean P. A. Drummond ◽  
Mark A. Bellgrove ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Mind Wandering ◽  
Attentional Lapses ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Local Sleep

Materialism in the philosophy of mind

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Howard Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Main Difficulty ◽  
Ordinary Sense ◽  
Causal Dependence ◽  
Physical Relation ◽  
The Third ◽  
Almost All ◽  
The Mind

Materialism – which, for almost all purposes, is the same as physicalism – is the theory that everything that exists is material. Natural science shows that most things are intelligible in material terms, but mind presents problems in at least two ways. The first is consciousness, as found in the ‘raw feel’ of subjective experience. The second is the intentionality of thought, which is the property of being about something beyond itself; ‘aboutness’ seems not to be a physical relation in the ordinary sense. There have been three ways of approaching these problems. The hardest is eliminativism, according to which there are no ‘raw feels’, no intentionality and, in general, no mental states: the mind and all its furniture are part of an outdated science that we now see to be false. Next is reductionism, which seeks to give an account of our experience and of intentionality in terms which are acceptable to a physical science: this means, in practice, analysing the mind in terms of its role in producing behaviour. Finally, the materialist may accept the reality and irreducibility of mind, but claim that it depends on matter in such an intimate way – more intimate than mere causal dependence – that materialism is not threatened by the irreducibility of mind. The first two approaches can be called ‘hard materialism’, the third ‘soft materialism’. The problem for eliminativism is that we find it difficult to credit that any belief that we think and feel is a theoretical speculation. Reductionism’s main difficulty is that there seems to be more to consciousness than its contribution to behaviour: a robotic machine could behave as we do without thinking or feeling. The soft materialist has to explain supervenience in a way that makes the mind not epiphenomenal without falling into the problems of interactionism.

scholarly journals The Decoupled Mind: Mind-wandering Disrupts Cortical Phase-locking to Perceptual Events

2014 ◽  
Vol 26 (11) ◽  
pp. 2596-2607 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Baird ◽  
Jonathan Smallwood ◽  
Antoine Lutz ◽  
Jonathan W. Schooler
Keyword(s):  
Sensory Input ◽  
Phase Locking ◽  
Mind Wandering ◽  
Task Demands ◽  
Perceptual Processing ◽  
Neural Processing ◽  
Stream Of Consciousness ◽  
Time Frequency ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain

The mind flows in a “stream of consciousness,” which often neglects immediate sensory input in favor of focusing on intrinsic, self-generated thoughts or images. Although considerable research has documented the disruptive influences of task-unrelated thought for perceptual processing and task performance, the brain dynamics associated with these phenomena are not well understood. Here we investigate the possibility, suggested by several convergent lines of research, that task-unrelated thought is associated with a reduction in the trial-to-trial phase consistency of the oscillatory neural signal in response to perceptual input. Using an experience sampling paradigm coupled with continuous high-density electroencephalography, we observed that task-unrelated thought was associated with a reduction of the P1 ERP, replicating prior observations that mind-wandering is accompanied by a reduction of the brain-evoked response to sensory input. Time–frequency analysis of the oscillatory neural response revealed a decrease in theta-band cortical phase-locking, which peaked over parietal scalp regions. Furthermore, we observed that task-unrelated thought impacted the oscillatory mode of the brain during the initiation of a task-relevant action, such that more cortical processing was required to meet task demands. Together, these findings document that the attenuation of perceptual processing that occurs during task-unrelated thought is associated with a reduction in the temporal fidelity with which the brain responds to a stimulus and suggest that increased neural processing may be required to recouple attention to a task. More generally, these data provide novel confirmatory evidence for the mechanisms through which attentional states facilitate the neural processing of sensory input.

The Visible Invisible

Neuro ◽  
2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikolas Rose ◽  
Joelle M. Abi-Rached
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Neural Activity ◽  
Brain Structure ◽  
Clinical Medicine ◽  
Mental States ◽  
The Body ◽  
Structural Imaging ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain

This chapter explores the diverse attempts to render “mind” thinkable by means of images. Advances in clinical medicine from the nineteenth century onward went hand in hand with the penetration of the gaze of the doctor into depths of the body itself. There are now many examples of analogous advances linked to the structural imaging of the brain—in the detection of tumors, the identification of lesions, and the mapping of the damage caused by injury or stroke. Thanks to such images, the mind of the neuroscientist, the neurologist, and the psychiatrist now seem able to “walk among the tissues themselves.” Yet, however similar the images of brain function are to those of brain structure, they mislead if they seem to allow the mind of the neuroscientist to walk among thoughts, feelings, or desires. Technology alone, even where it appears to measure neural activity, cannot enable the gaze to bridge the gap between molecules and mental states.

States of Mind: Characterizing the Neural Bases of Focus and Mind-wandering through Dynamic Functional Connectivity

2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 495-506 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin W. Mooneyham ◽  
Michael D. Mrazek ◽  
Alissa J. Mrazek ◽  
Kaita L. Mrazek ◽  
Dawa T. Phillips ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Functional Connectivity ◽  
Mind Wandering ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Focused Attention ◽  
Supporting Evidence ◽  
Dispositional Mindfulness ◽  
Dynamic Functional Connectivity ◽  
Brain States ◽  
The Mind

During tasks that require continuous engagement, the mind alternates between mental states of focused attention and mind-wandering. Existing research has assessed the functional connectivity of intrinsic brain networks underlying the experience and training of these mental states using “static” approaches that assess connectivity across an entire task. To disentangle the different functional connectivity between brain regions that occur as the mind fluctuates between discrete brain states, we employed a dynamic functional connectivity approach that characterized brain activity using a sliding window. This approach identified distinct states of functional connectivity between regions of the executive control, salience, and default networks during a task requiring sustained attention to the sensations of breathing. The frequency of these distinct brain states demonstrated opposing correlations with dispositional mindfulness, suggesting a correspondence to the mental states of focused attention and mind-wandering. We then determined that an intervention emphasizing the cultivation of mindfulness increased the frequency of the state that had been associated with a greater propensity for focused attention, especially for those who improved most in dispositional mindfulness. These findings provide supporting evidence that mind-wandering involves the corecruitment of brain regions within the executive and default networks. More generally, this work illustrates how emerging neuroimaging methods may allow for the characterization of discrete brain states based on patterns of functional connectivity even when external indications of these states are difficult or impossible to measure.

The Neuroscience of Spontaneous Thought

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica R. Andrews-Hanna ◽  
Zachary C. Irving ◽  
Kieran C.R. Fox ◽  
R. Nathan Spreng ◽  
Kalina Christoff
Keyword(s):  
Dynamic Properties ◽  
Mind Wandering ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Additional Research ◽  
Science Of Mind ◽  
Mind And Brain ◽  
Spontaneous Thought ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Over Time

An often-overlooked characteristic of the human mind is its propensity to wander. Despite growing interest in the science of mind-wandering, most studies operationalize mind-wandering by its task-unrelated contents, which may be orthogonal to the processes constraining how thoughts are evoked and unfold over time. This chapter emphasizes the importance of incorporating such processes into current definitions of mind-wandering, and proposes that mind-wandering and other forms of spontaneous thought (such as dreaming and creativity) are mental states that arise and transition relatively freely due to an absence of constraints on cognition. The chapter reviews existing psychological, philosophical, and neuroscientific research on spontaneous thought through the lens of this framework, and calls for additional research into the dynamic properties of the mind and brain.

scholarly journals Two conceptions of consciousness and why only the neo-Aristotelian one enables us to construct evolutionary explanations

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Harry Smit ◽  
Peter Hacker
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Neural Activity ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Causal Relation ◽  
Conscious Experience ◽  
Neural Processes ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Open Thermodynamic Systems ◽  
Evolutionary Explanations

Abstract Descartes separated the physical from the mental realm and presupposed a causal relation between conscious experience and neural processes. He denominated conscious experiences ‘thoughts’ and held them to be indubitable. However, the question of how we can bridge the gap between subjective experience and neural activity remained unanswered, and attempts to integrate the Cartesian conception with evolutionary theory has not resulted in explanations and testable hypotheses. It is argued that the alternative neo-Aristotelian conception of the mind as the capacities of intellect and will resolves these problems. We discuss how the neo-Aristotelian conception, extended with the notion that organisms are open thermodynamic systems that have acquired heredity, can be integrated with evolutionary theory, and elaborate how we can explain four different forms of consciousness in evolutionary terms.

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