Abstract
People often feel like their minds and their bodies are in different places. Far from an exotic experience, this phenomenon seems to be a ubiquitous facet of human life (e.g., Killingsworth and Gilbert, 2010). Many times, people's minds seem to go “somewhere else”—attention becomes disconnected from perception, and people's minds wander to times and places removed from the current environment (e.g., Schooler et al., 2004). At other times, however, people's minds may seem to go nowhere at all—they simply disappear. This mental state—mind-blanking—may represent an extreme decoupling of perception and attention, one in which attention fails to bring any stimuli into conscious awareness. In the present research, we outline the properties of mind-blanking, differentiating this mental state from other mental states in terms of phenomenological experience, behavioral outcomes, and underlying cognitive processes. Seven experiments suggest that when the mind seems to disappear, there are times when we have simply failed to monitor its whereabouts—and there are times when it is actually gone.
Highlights
People often feel like their minds and their bodies are in different places
If mind-blanking and mind-wandering were positively correlated, this may suggest that people were sloppy categorizers—any off-task mental state was classified as either mind-blanking or mind-wandering, depending on the probe presented
A second stepwise multiple regression with the same factors for Experiment 2b confirmed that mind-wandering accounted for all difference in test performance in this experiment: full regression F(1, 54) = 10.74, p < 0.01; βwander = −0.41, t = −3.28, p < 0.01; βblank = ns. Results from these experiments both corroborate the findings of Experiment 1—that mind-blanking and mind-wandering are phenomenologically distinct experiences—and provide evidence that these mental states are associated with different behavioral outcomes
Summary
People often feel like their minds and their bodies are in different places. Far from an exotic experience, this phenomenon seems to be a ubiquitous facet of human life (e.g., Killingsworth and Gilbert, 2010). People’s minds may seem to go nowhere at all—they disappear This mental state—mind-blanking—may represent an extreme decoupling of perception and attention, one in which attention fails to bring any stimuli into conscious awareness. The individual is not focally aware of any stimuli, either internal or external This definition may conjure up images of mind-blanking drivers suddenly swerving into oncoming traffic and joggers dropping to the pavement midstride, research suggests that conscious awareness is unnecessary for much of human functioning; rather, the vast majority of cognitive processing and behavioral control seems to occur outside of conscious awareness. When stimuli fail to reach conscious awareness and the mind goes blank, the persistence of non-conscious processes may allow people to continue carrying out surprisingly elaborate behaviors, even in the absence of this hallmark of human experience. The decoupling of attention and perception allows the mind to wander—to fill consciousness with ideas related to times unknown, places unseen, and possibilities previously unimagined (as well as other, more practical mental contents—such as what kind of bread to pick up on the way home from work)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
