When the mind empties... in full wakefulness
What if you could be awake... without thinking about anything? This is the strange experience that researchers are trying to decipher in a study published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences. Coordinated by Athena Demertzi (Laboratoire de Physiologie de la Cognition, Université de Liège), an international team of neuroscientists and philosophers is proposing a new framework for understanding “mind blanks”, those moments when we literally feel our mind is empty.
L
ong considered a simple sign of distraction or sleepiness, mind blanking is now emerging as a mental state in its own right, with very specific physiological, cognitive and neuronal characteristics. Using data from behavioral experiments, brain imaging and conceptual analyses, researchers show that this state is accompanied by a drop in cortical activity, atypical cognitive functions and even sleep-like brain signals... while remaining awake.
The phenomenon is also intriguing for its similarities to certain meditative states or the famous “white dreams” - those phases of sleep with no memory of a dream, but from which you wake up with the feeling of having “been somewhere”.
“By comparing these states, we hope to better understand what it means to be conscious without having any mental content,” explains study co-author Antoine Lutz.
This work is not limited to theoretical reflection: it could shed light on clinical disorders such as ADHD, dementia, epilepsy or certain anxiety disorders, where “absences” similar to mental emptiness are frequently reported.
The authors put forward a novel model, in which mind blanks result from a complex cocktail: decreased background vigilance, altered cerebral connections, and disruption of key functions such as memory or attention.
“It's not a simple absence of thought, but a mental state in its own right, which could tell us a lot about how our brain works”, Athena Demertzi points out.
By inviting us to consider mind blanking as a scientific object in its own right, this study opens up new avenues for better understanding states of consciousness... even those that seem to have no content at all.
Reference
Thomas Andrillon∙ Antoine Lutz ∙ Jennifer Windt ∙ Athena Demertzi, Where is my mind? A neurocognitive investigation of mind blanking, Trends in Cognitive Sciences,
