Friday 6 July 2012

Adrian Ward: Mind Blanking: When the Stream of Consciousness Runs Dry


Abstract: Is it possible for the mind to be blank? Conscious thought is central to human experience, and this centrality has led many to propose that the stream of consciousness is uninterrupted - that 'thought is without breach, crack, or division' (James, 1892). We propose that these presumptions of omnipresence are premature, and explore the phenomenon of 'mind-blanking,' a mental state defined by a lack of conscious thought. Using experimental evidence from several studies, we present the case that (1) mind-blanking is a distinct mental state, distinguishable from both stimulus-dependent thought and other stimulus-independent mental states such as mind-wandering; (2) mind-blanking is subject to ironic effects of mental control, such that attempts to suppress blanking result in more blanking than if suppression had never been attempted; and (3) mind-blanking is subject to ego depletion effects, such that ego-depleting activities result in higher incidences of blanking during a subsequent free thought period.

Blackmore, S. (2002) There is no stream of consciousness. ournal of Consciousness Studies, Volume 9, number 5-6 http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/Articles/jcs02.htm
Jonathan W. Schooler (2002) Re-representing consciousness: dissociations between experience and meta- consciousness. TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.6 No.8

Comments invited


37 comments:

  1. I am wondering about the relationship between mind-blanking states and motor performance. Athletes perform better when they are not attending to the biomechanics of movements they are performing (sorry can't find the reference for this now). So, what is it about mind-blank state that *seems* to allow for a more direct activation of motor implicit knowledge, or maybe just less inhibition? Anyone can point me out to literature on the neural correlates of mind-blanking? (guess i am not giving google scholar the right keywords)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. This comment has been removed by the author.

      Delete
    2. Ana, I'm afraid I don't have (google) knowledge of the relevant literature. However, your comment makes me wonder about 'what counts' as mind-blanking. If I think of this on purely subjective terms, my intuitive understanding of mind-blanking is that it is a state in which the stream of consciousness (another expression that needs defining, perhaps) is interrupted, and in which this interruption is noticed solely upon a (rather intense) re-connect to conscious thought. In the case of high-performance athletic activity, the mind may well be devoid of tangible thought, but I would argue that the individual is highly focused - a state that I think differs significantly from what we conventionally understand as 'mind-blanking'. I would suggest that the difference between the highly focused state experienced during physical activity and 'normal' consciousness - or even, to make a stronger case, during a highly focused state experienced, say, during an exam - has a lot to do with the episodic memory requirements to execute the task at hand, but that ultimately, the two are conscious states, distinct from 'mind-blanking'.

      Delete
    3. Nico: Thanks...I see your points and I agree. These are potentially different states. It would be nice to have a more grasping definition of mind-blank.

      Delete
    4. Hello!

      Great comments here (and below).

      Ana, what you're referring to is the state that is generally called "flow" (look up work by Csikszentmihalyi for a primer). Unfortunately, what he calls "flow" is so broad that it doesn't really mean much (for example, he counts both being "aware of nothing" and "extremely aware of everything" as being part of the flow state).

      In terms of literature...there really isn't anything out there that looks at mind-blanking per se (the data I presented today are from the first paper that we're submitting, and we have two more in the pipeline - one distinguishing mind-blanking from other mental states, and the other showing the relationship between mind-blanking and ego depletion). Your best bet would be to look at Watts & Sharrock (1988, I believe) or some of the Descriptive Experience Sampling literature (mostly done by Heavey and Hurlburt).

      In response to both Nico and Ana: I agree that a more precise definition of mind-blanking would be useful. When I talk to psychologists, I generally give a more clearly defined idea of the concept, but I intentionally backed off from that for this crowd because there are so many taxonomies of consciousness floating around out there.

      In any event, my favorite current definition centers around the idea of "awareness of awareness." There's certainly something going on (we don't just fall over into comas); however, we're not aware of it - we might be aware, at some low level, of perceptual stimuli or other inputs - but we aren't aware of this awareness (either in the moment or after the fact (the "after the fact" part matters because it differentiates mind-blanking from mind-wandering - see Schooler (2002) for a discussion of awareness, meta-awareness, and mental time travel).

      Thanks again for your great comments!

      Delete
  2. I first want to say that I really enjoy the study, especially the originality of the protocol.
    But I wonder what the term "mind blanking" means exactly. In the example given by Ward, I just don't see how the fear of speaking in public is similar to have a "black" moment. And also like an other person ask, a "loss", mind wandering moment.
    We fear to forget our text in the same way we fear to forget what we learned on front of an exam. But I wouldn't call it "mind blanking"

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Marie-Lou:

      First, I TOTALLY agree with you re: fear of speaking in public. I honestly don't like that example, and only use it because people tend to connect with it (and enjoy the comparison to a fear of death). I think it might be an example of a FEAR of going blank, but the experience of going blank in public per se is probably very rarely an actual instance of mind-blanking (my intuition is that people are aware of the fact that they're "blank" - which means that they're thinking and, as a result, not actually blank).

      See above for my description of mind-blanking as "awareness of awareness," and let me know how that sits with you!

      Delete
    2. Thank you for this explanation! I was wondering about this example too! I think the explanation you did about the lack of awareness of awareness is clearer. You also said below that you “have research suggesting that we can't recall our mental states post-hoc if we were blank” which makes total sense and explain further that this example isn’t a case of mind-blanking. I wonder if intense fear could create a mind-blanking episode? It might not be very adaptative since we have to react (fight or flight). But on the other end, we might be able to react even with mind-blanking...

      Delete
  3. IMHO, it may be interesting to experimentally contrast mind blanks with experiences of mindfulness. Mindfulness practices such as meditation have been explored by recent neuroscience work and have been linked to such mental events as consciousness and attention. Perhaps comparing and contrasting the dynamics of both kinds of states might yield interesting insights.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Comparing mind blanking and mindfulness is really interesting, but what about hypnosis? Does our thoughts under hypnosis have any content?

      Delete
    2. They might sure have. I think it's the main basis for hypnotherapists to investigate "anchored thoughts from childhood", for whoever dares believing in their validity.

      Delete
    3. There are several states that can be called "mind blanking".

      For example:
      * the total focus of an olympic athelete on their (individual) performance. Conscious thoughts are too slow and are distracting, hence peak performance is only achieved by blanking them.

      * when you are tired or distracted or confused and simply "zone out" for a short while. It is likely that consciousness in this state is actually quite similar to that of the athelete.

      * when you empty your conscious mind of all internal dialog and images. This can easily happen in hypnotic trance and meditation. Typically, you have awareness that there was a period of time of which you were un-aware (but only afterwards).

      * and probably others.

      To distinguish and study these, subjects could be hypnotized and trained, in trance, to display unconscious ideomotor responses (e.g. finger lifts) when their UNCONSCIOUS is aware that the conscious mind has blanked. It should be possible to distinguish between types of mind-blank in this way. Any moderately competent hypnotist could guide subjects to consistent and comparable responses and this would avoid the contamination of requiring the conscious mind to report when it is shut off.

      @Romain - thoughts under hypnosis most definitely have content, and are usually much more vivid and focused that thoughts under normal consciousness. Whether the subject remembers them on return to normal consciousness is usually dependent on the suggestions that the hypnotist gives. It is common that, without explicit instructions to remember, the subject just loses track of all that went on.

      Delete
    4. Hey Bruce!

      Thanks again for your ideas re: meditation. I like the idea that meditation allows you to get around the problem of asking people to consciously report about the lack of conscious awareness. If we can train people to report about their mental states without having to engage meta-consciousness (which necessarily requires thought), then we can open up the possibility of having people report the blank mind in-the-moment (as opposed to after they notice it has passed (as in self-caught self-report studies) or after we FORCE them to notice that they are in that state (as in probe-caught self-report studies).

      Delete
  4. First, on a metaphysical note, I am confused about how blank blank is. If we assume consciousness (on a low level) is all-or-none, I do not see how, if we are still online (ie not comatose), this flow could be disrupted (and not just because I never see the fridge light OFF). So if nothing is nothing, then nothing must be something. Is blanking just something we can't access in the form of our mentalese when we blank? Ie consciousness is still there, just not ascertainable?
    I suppose support for this would come from an example of having some sort of an experience while we are blank, and although it is not accessed during the blank, we are able to consciously recall it later.
    My second concern is with the sampling done of loaded and sometimes underage rambling people in downtown Boston. How well were these subjects briefed on what it means to go blank? Something tells me there must be some sort of levels here. As Ward admitted in question period, there is no way to distinguish between day-dreaming and blanking other than by subjective report.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hey there!

      I don't know if we can assume that consciousness is all-or-none - that's why I drew the distinction between transitive and intransitive states of consciousness, and mentioned that I would be focusing not on whether or not people were capable of awareness (e.g., being alive v. being dead), but on what they were aware OF (e.g., a thought, a sensation).

      Your comments about blanking be something we can't access in terms of our mentalese seem closer to the idea - as mentioned in comments above, I'm closing in on talking about mind-blanking in terms of "awareness of awareness" - we may be minimally aware of something at the moment, but we are not aware of that awareness (either in this moment, or after the fact).

      Your comments about being able to recall an experience after the moment of blanking actually wouldn't fit under my definition of blanking (and I have research suggesting that we can't recall our mental states post-hoc if we were blank). This is actually one of the big differences between mind-blanking and mind-wandering without awareness (a state in which consciousness is active, but meta-consciousness is not (see Schooler, 2002)). When people are mind-wandering without awareness, they can perform "mental time travel" and report their prior mental states - even though they weren't meta-consciously aware of them at the time. When we ask people to do the same thing after they report being blank, they are unable to do so. This also leads to the idea of blanking as a lack of awareness of awareness - even if you are aware of something at a very low level, you are unaware of awareness and, as a result, unable to report on mental states experienced while you are blank.

      In terms of describing blanking to people in downtown Boston, everyone received the same definition, and we asked them to explain it back to us. People who couldn't were excused from the study. It's not a perfect control, but we did make an effort to ensure that everyone understood the concept.

      Finally, I don't think I ever said anything about it being impossible to distinguish between day-dreaming and blanking other than by subjective report (except for possibly in the d-prime / computer study). In all other studies, people completed "free thought" tasks - basically, all we asked them to do was daydream. A report of mind-blanking during this task couldn't be confounded with a report of daydreaming (or mind-wandering), because the first state is off-task and the second is on-task.

      Thanks for the great comments!

      Delete
  5. I also think mind-blanking could mean many things and there could be different levels of "empty" states of mind. As this could be difficult to define, I suspect it won' t be easy to pin this state down experimentally as well. I would like to commend Dr. Ward on his attempt!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Carey-

      I agree that mind-blanking is a slippery beast, and agree that there could be different degrees of "emptiness." No one has ever studied mind-blanking per se, and we're definitely just at the beginning stages - but each new study gets us closer!

      Another important thing is that I don't think we have to argue for mind-blanking being a state that represents 0% consciousness. I'm interesting in a lot of blanking-related phenomena, but one potential use of pinning down the blank mind is using it as a tool to compare behavior/experience in the blank state v. in a non-blank state. To do this, we don't need to compare 0% to 100% - all we need is a relative difference, so we could find interesting results even if we were really just comparing 25% to 75% (obviously those number are made up, but I'm sure you get the idea).

      Thanks!

      Delete
    2. It can't be an easy thing to pin down (if it's possible at all!). I think it's very smart that without necessarily pinning it down, you looked at how each person's subjective experience of this state can be modulated by varying other factors, such as intention to blank or not to blank out, the level of distraction from the environment and as well as alcohol in our bloodstream! I would be curious though, how the brain looks when we are trying to blank out (thus not succeed) vs. when we blank out naturally (of course, all in gradations).

      Delete
  6. I wonder if there are any external manifestations of mind-blanking (like the gaze, or something). It could be interesting to records these signs by eye-tracking...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hey Romain!

      My collaborator (Dan Wegner) and I actually had plans to do an eye tracking study, but we got beat to the punch by some people in the mind-wandering camp...there's a paper on eye-movements during reading while wandering.

      That's not to say that a mind-blanking/eye tracking study wouldn't be interesting - it just got pushed back on the priorities list.

      However, we're still interested in exploring psychophysiological correlates of mind-blanking (e.g., skin conductance, EEG).

      Thanks!

      Delete
  7. Good observations, Dr. Ward. I think I've discussed such phenomena in my 1988 and 1997 books, in connection with "Redundancy Effects." They occur predictably with repeated stimulation past the point of "satiation". (But satiation is an explanatory construct that is probably wrong, since mind-blanking in those situations is highly stimulus-dependent). A famous example is the Ganzfeld effect.

    In the contemplative traditions it is known by a variety of names, most spectacularly "pure consciousness," defined in the Vedanta tradition as "consciousness without contents." Mantra meditation gives rise to such experiences, as do many other contemplative techniques.

    There are many empirical studies on mind-blanking in those traditions, searchable under "meditation effects" in PubMed.gov. In the TM series on these effects they were strongly associated with spontaneous breath cessations without compensatory overbreathing. I have experienced these effects numerous times (they are not very spectacular, they just happen), and so have large numbers of people who have practiced mantra meditation.

    The point about no compensatory overbreathing is that momentary breath cessation is quite different from "holding one's breath" in diving, for example. After a long dive, we spontaneously feel the need to breath deeply until the O2/CO2 balance comes back to normal in the bloodstream. The absence of overbreathing after spontaneous breath cessation in mantra meditation indicates there is no oxygen lack, and therefore no homeostatic re-balancing. Physiologically that is a very powerful piece of evidence for a genuine decrease in metabolic demand.

    So it's a very interesting, easily established phenomenon that millions of mantra meditators have noticed. The fact that the early reports have NOT been replicated in published form is a major failure of normal scientific method. Replication in these cases is always mandatory. For this reason there is still doubt about what must be obvious and trivial to millions of people. In proper science this failure to replicate should be scandalous --- like failing to replicate Newton's prism experiment, for example. It's easy as heck to do.

    The taboo against studying consciousness is part of the problem, and there is an additional burden of taboo against studying unusual states of consciousness. Completely unscientific.

    In any case, yes, there are blank periods of consciousness, as William James described so beautifully. Jonathan Schooler has done important empirical studies of the similar phenomenon of absent-minded reading, which we all experience as well.

    BJB

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Dear Dr. Baars,

      it warms my heart so much to read that you are also outraged by the lack of interest in the meditative state on the part of western research.

      I am very puzzled by this. Eastern cultures know and practice meditation (and blanking of the mind) for millennia, yet here we barely even start to acknowledge even that we can experience such a state. What's your idea for the origin of this difference? I was wondering if it could be due to the fact that meditative states have been in the west perhaps practiced to some extent but always associated to prayer in the context of the religious practice - and therefore, from the start assumed to be irrelevant for science. And could that also be part of the origin of the "taboo against consciousness" that you mention? My question is probably a bit naive, but I don't know the history surrounding this...

      Delete
    2. Excellent comments, Dr. Baars, and greatly appreciated!

      I agree that it's a shame that Western research has largely ignored the idea of a "blank mind." I think you're right that it's probably due to the taboo against consciousness research, as well as an unfortunate Western tendency to discount Eastern thought/experience (which, as you said, has been explored, documented, and researched for quite some time). Hopefully this trend will change, and my personal belief (and hope) is that putting some of the observations of the East into the terminology/methodology of the West will help; it's a shame that this may be the best route - but I think it's better than the alternative of leaving wide swaths of the varieties of conscious experience unexplored.

      One question re: mantra meditation. As I understand it, this form of meditation consists of repeating phrases (i.e., mantras) repeatedly. Is there a time when these mantras essentially fade into the background, leaving the individual with something like pure consciousness? I've personally had a bit of trouble with finding the correct way to connect mind-blanking with meditative techniques because of the wide variety of styles of meditation (for example, the majority of my experience with Buddhist meditation has consisted of focusing on some low-level stimulus - e.g., a flame, the sound of a gong, one's own breathing or bloodflow). These types of meditation (and most with which I'm familiar) seem to be reducing the scope of conscious awareness and reducing it to low levels of activity, but I wonder at what point (if any) they might cross over into a state where the mind that is devoid of awareness altogether (or at least devoid of the "awareness of awareness").

      Again, thanks SO much for your comments - the best feedback is always that which leads us closer to the truth, and you've certainly provided some food for thought (and a renewed desire to connect our (admittedly Westernized) version of "mind-blanking" with Eastern schools of thought).

      And - although sometimes it's hard to be honest without seeming like you're sucking up - let me just say that many of your papers/books have been instrumental in helping me construct my personal views of conscious/conscious awareness - so thank you for that, as well.

      Best,
      Adrian

      Delete
    3. Dear Professor Ward and Professor Baars, reading your comments raised some questions and I would like to read your opinion on the following, please.
      I have issues understanding what is the link between mind-blanking and meditative states/flow experiences, apart from the fact that they are both states where consciousness is "free or light in content".
      This might have been said elsewhere, but I understood from Mr Ward' s presentation that mind-blanking it rather involuntary and undesirable (i.e. repeating oneself NOT to go blank at a public speaking)

      Medidative states and flow experiences appear to be on the other side of the spectrum, being rather voluntary and desirable (efficient, present-centered mindsets attained through repeating a mantra or a thought or mentally rehearsing an action --- sounds like implementation intentions to me). Mark Lear (Duke University, NC) designate these states as "hypo-egoic self-regulation", in which conscious thoughts conflicting with execution of action (i.e. self-defeating emotions or temptations) are silenced, thus fostering flow experience and reducing self-regulatory expenditure (Leary & Guadagno, 2011 - Also see his chapter in the Handbook of Self and Identity, 2012).

      On the energy expenditure level, Mind-blanking occurs more often in ego-depleted states (low mental energy, impaired and slow decision making, you know this), while meditative states / flow experience / hypo-egoic self-regulation preserve self-regulatory energy and prevents ego-depletion. Also, on way to attain the latter is by using implementation intentions (mental repetitions), which also spares self-regulatory energy on the long run.

      On the contrary, Mind-Blanking happens when one repeats to himself NOT to go blank. (Personally, I find doing this a silly idea, because focussing on something else (or repeating focused toughest) would help better and might even help to attain a meditative/flow/hypo-egoic state).


      In brief, the only way I see a link between mind-blanking and meditative/flow/hypo-egoic states is that they are on opposite side of the same spectrum. They would be on the same level, and mind-blanking would be an involuntary state of content-free mind in the ABSENCE of goal-directed behaviours that guide functioning while on that state, or as a COUNTERPRODUCTIVE consequence of the accumulation of goal-conflicting thoughts resulting in an dysfunctional free-of-content mind.


      Do you agree with this ? Is it something that was said before? Do you consider doing experiments with goal-directed behaviour where you contrast the two states?

      thank you !

      Delete
  8. Here is a bunch of questions/comments I had when listening to Adrian Ward's talk :

    1) As described by Adrian, mind blanking is a mental state completely free of content. But having a mental state without any content isn't it a content it-self for the brain? and then if the brain can interpret mind blanking as a stimulus, is there a function of mind blanking? might the function of mind-blanking be to temporarily reset the brain in mentally unsolvable situations, a bit as when we faint because the body is too threatened?

    2) Does the fact that mind-blanking seems to be under control would be an adaptive function?

    3)When we have mind blanking, aren't we attending to our mind blanking? in other words, is that really a completely thought-free mental state?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. COMMENTS COPIED AND PASTED FROM THE CORRESPONDING POST ON FACEBOOK :

      PIERRE BOUCHER :
      "I was extremely intrigued by his talk and asked him similar questions after his talk. To answer your third question first, we only become aware of mind blanking after it has occured. Otherwise it would not be mind blanking, as you would have contents, ie the metaawareness that your mind is blank and he says that this does not fit his defintion for mind blanking."

      PIERRE BOUCHER :
      "You answer your second question as part of your first comment. As for the first question, yes the the mental state of mind blanking is content for the brain, but the state is not content for it self, so the mind is still blank."

      PAULINE CLAUDE :
      "But does mind blanking have a uncouscious meaning for the brain?"

      PIERRE BOUCHER :
      "That is a good question. I have no intuition on that, but probably"

      PAULINE CLAUDE :
      "If I go with my intuition, a complete absence of stimuli is itself a stimulus for the brain. Organisms evolved to respond to a continuous reception of stimuli. It might be very disturbing to suddenly stop perceiving any single thing and so, it should rise an alarm to say "hey! that's not normal, what's going on? you have to do something to go back to normal"!"

      Delete
  9. Dr. Ward, I enjoyed the talk very much, thank you. Do you have any intention (and would it be a good idea anyway) to study and compare mind-blanking in people who practice meditation regularly? Would they have more control over it?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Juliette-

      Great question! My intuition is that they certainly would. One place to read about some o the amazing effects of meditation is in the work of Katherine MacLean. For example:

      http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2010/05/11/0956797610371339.abstract

      She finds that experienced meditators seems to have greater mental/cognitive/conscious control across the board - even in completely novel tasks. For example, people who have gone through an intensive meditative retreat are much better at a simple line discrimination task (which they've never seen before) than those who have not. She also addresses potential confounds (particularly, the possibility that meditation isn't causing the difference, but that people who are motivated to practice meditation are simply different than those who aren't) by using another group of meditators as her control group - this control group was scheduled to take the retreat after the initial group, so she had the ability to test two groups who were matched on their tendency to seek out meditative experiences, with the only difference being that one group had completed the retreat and the other had not.

      There's more out there, but that's a personal favorite of mine - especially because it speaks directly to the ideas of conscious control and awareness.

      Delete
  10. Great talk. I am wondering: has there been any empirical study of people who have much less frequent states mind-blanking than other people? I am asking because that might be a good way of determing if mind-blanking plays a fundamental role in our cognitive economy. And what that role might be. For instance, in the case of inner speech, some empirical studies have shown that schizophrenic people are less involved in inner sppech on a daily basis.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Alexandre-

      Good question.

      To my knowledge, the answer is "no" - at least not by people who use terms related to the blank mind, the lack of consciousness, etc. We certainly find individual differences in our own research, but haven't connected these differences to behavioral outcomes. We have a few sets of relevant results, though - for example:

      -The effect of mind-blanking on reading comprehension (paper in preparation): Incidence of blanking is uncorrelated with comprehension (whereas incidence of mind-wandering is negatively correlated with comprehension). I think this mostly shows that there's something different going on between blanking and wandering, not necessarily that blanking is or isn't related to the ideas behind CE.

      -Ego-depletion effects on mind-blanking (paper in preparation): people display more mind-blanking after an ego-depleting task than after a less-depleting task. This suggests that consciousness requires energy, and blanking may be a way of conserving that energy. I think this speaks more directly to the energy/outcome ideas behind CE - however, this only covers the energy part (and not the outcomes).

      Hope that helps!

      Delete
    2. Great talk and all this discussion is truly interesting!
      With the paper in preparation about the link between ego-depletion effects on mind-blanking, I'm wondering if there is a relation to seek out with mulitple personalities pathology. I mean, if we do more mind-blanking after an ego-depleting task, may be it is adaptive in a way that we can "escape" ego-depletion experience when it is too hard to be aware of it. Could it be plausible then that, if we are too ofently exposed to ego-depletion, we could fall more and more into mind-blanking state, without beeing aware of it? And so on, could it eventually leads to multiple personnalities pathology?

      Delete
  11. Is there any connection between mind-blanking and the symptom of "petit-mal"/absence seizures?

    ReplyDelete
  12. This is something I was wondering as well, and I was really surprised to see it go unmentioned in the talk. Given the difficulty in controlling the subjects in the experiments described by Dr. Ward, a physiological correlate of these blanking states would add much to the studies, so the experimenters are not left to simply trust that the subjects are doing as instructed (that is, an objective measure to ensure that the subjects are truly "blanking out" and not just paying attention to something other than the task in front of them). Petit mal seizures have a very distinct EEG trace. Dr. Ward, is a similar trace evident in during the mind blanking you describe?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Roberto (and also Martha)!

      We've considered connections to petit mal seizures, but haven't been able to do any psychophys work yet (we have IRB approval for it, but it's a matter of lining up priorities). I agree that it would be extremely useful to find a physiological correlate of mind-blanking, and hope to do that down the road - but right now we're starting at the only place we can...the beginning. Taking a phenomenological approach, and building a program of multiple behavioral/self-report studies so we can - at a minimum - get an idea of how to get a handle on a mental state that FEELS different from other mental states (specifically, one that feels "blank" - both in the moment and after-the-fact).

      So...to answer your question: we don't know...yet. But I would be surprised if a state that has such distinct phenomenological and behavioral correlates (even from mind-wandering without awareness, which might be the most closely-related mental state) doesn't also have a distinct physiological signature.

      Delete
  13. I also really enjoyed this talk! I was wondering, is ’ mind blanking’ in the sense of not thinking of anything the same thing as not remembering something, such as blanking in public speaking or forgetting where one put their keys or walking into a room and not remembering why we came into that room? Surely there is a difference between a blank mind in the context of meditation vs. ‘going blank’ in front of an audience.
    In the case of forgetting where we put our keys, I remember one of my professors saying that we are not in fact forgetting where we put our keys, but the memory was never made/consolidated in the first place. I was then wondering if someone could expand on the relationship, if any, between mind blanking and memory and the extent to which they could be related.

    Izabo Deschênes

    ReplyDelete
  14. I am curious if there is any relationship to age and the frequency of mind-blanking. I remember in one of the studies, the mean age was 22 years. Has there been any comparison between different age populations?

    ReplyDelete
  15. Xavier Dery ‏@XavierDery

    Ward meta-quotes William James, does that count as TWO references to William James? I think we're up to a good dozen occurences Lol#TuringC

    12:32 PM - 6 Jul 12 via Twicca Twitter app

    ReplyDelete