One of the most striking features of human consciousness is its ability to foster an ongoing, seemingly continuous stream of thought. Prior studies have provided valuable insights into the neural correlates of the content of thought (e.g., whether it is task related or not). However, independent of its content, the stream of thought can also be characterized by its dynamics—how it changes over...
The flow of thought is persistent, and at times merciless. Mental content is generated throughout the day and into the night, moving forward predictably at times but surprisingly at others. Understanding what influences the trajectory of thought—how thoughts continuously unfold over time—has important implications for the diagnosis and treatment of thought disorders like schizophrenia and...
Abstract The human prefrontal cortex is a structurally and functionally heterogenous brain region, including multiple subregions that have been linked to different large-scale brain networks. It contributes to a broad range of mental phenomena, from goal-directed thought and executive functions to mind-wandering and psychedelic experience. Here we review what is known about the functions of...
Thoughts that appear to come to us ‘out of the blue’ or ‘out of nowhere’ are a familiar aspect of mental experience. Such thoughts tend to elicit feelings of surprise and spontaneity. Although we are beginning to understand the neural processes that underlie the arising of such thoughts, little is known about what accounts for their peculiar phenomenology. Here, we focus on one central aspect...
Abstract Individuals use various strategies to cope with challenging emotions such as anxiety. Mindful acceptance involves broadening attentional scope and fully experiencing present moment sensory feelings (whether pleasant or unpleasant) without judgment or elaboration. In contrast, narrative-evaluation involves focusing on a narrow band of sensory experience and generating an elaborate...
Contemporary investigations regard creativity as a dynamic form of cognition that involves movement between the dissociable stages of creative generation and creative evaluation. Our recently proposed Dynamic Framework of Thought (Christoff et al., 2016) offered a conceptualization of these stages in terms of an interplay between sources of constraint and variability on thought. This initial...
Despite increasing scientific interest in self-generated thought-mental content largely independent of the immediate environment-there has yet to be any comprehensive synthesis of the subjective experience and neural correlates of affect in these forms of thinking. Here, we aim to develop an integrated affective neuroscience encompassing many forms of self-generated thought-normal and...
Enormous questions still loom for the emerging science of spontaneous thought: what, exactly, is spontaneous thought? Why does our brain engage in spontaneous forms of thinking, and when is this most likely to occur? And perhaps the question most interesting and accessible from a scientific perspective: how does the brain generate, elaborate, and evaluate its own spontaneous creations? The...
Humans have employed an incredible variety of plant-derived substances over the millennia in order to alter consciousness and perception. Among the innumerable narcotics, analgesics, 'ordeal' drugs, and other psychoactive substances discovered and used in ritualistic contexts by cultures around the world, one class in particular stands out not only for its radical psychological effects, but...
Meditation and hypnosis both aim to facilitate cognitive-emotional flexibility, i.e., the "de-automatization" of thought and behavior. However, little research or theory has addressed how internal thought patterns might change after such interventions, even though alterations in the internal flow of consciousness may precede externally observable changes in behavior. This chapter outlines three...
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Thoughts arise spontaneously in our minds with remarkable frequency, but tracking the brain systems associated with the early inception of a thought has proved challenging. Here we addressed this issue by taking advantage of the heightened introspective ability of experienced mindfulness practitioners to observe the onset of their spontaneously arising thoughts. We found subtle differences in...
Meditation is a family of mental practices that encompasses a wide array of\ntechniques employing distinctive mental strategies. We systematically reviewed\n78 functional neuroimaging (fMRI and PET) studies of meditation, and used\nactivation likelihood estimation to meta-analyze 257 peak foci from 31\nexperiments involving 527 participants. We found reliably dissociable patterns\nof brain...
Meditation is a family of mental practices that encompasses a wide array of techniques employing distinctive mental strategies. We systematically reviewed 78 functional neuroimaging (fMRI and PET) studies of meditation, and used activation likelihood estimation to meta-analyze 257 peak foci from 31 experiments involving 527 participants. We found reliably dissociable patterns of brain...
Meditation is a family of mental practices that encompasses a wide array of techniques employing distinctive mental strategies. We systematically reviewed 78 functional neuroimaging (fMRI and PET) studies of meditation, and used activation likelihood estimation to meta-analyze 257 peak foci from 31 experiments involving 527 participants. We found reliably dissociable patterns of brain...
The neural basis and cognitive functions of various spontaneous thought processes, particularly mind-wandering, are increasingly being investigated. Although strong links have been drawn between the occurrence of spontaneous thought processes and activation in brain regions comprising the default mode network (DMN), spontaneous thought also appears to recruit other, non-DMN regions just as...
Isolated reports have long suggested a similarity in content and thought processes across mind wandering (MW) during waking, and dream mentation during sleep. This overlap has encouraged speculation that both "daydreaming" and dreaming may engage similar brain mechanisms. To explore this possibility, we systematically examined published first-person experiential reports of MW and dreaming and...
The accuracy of subjective reports, especially those involving introspection of one's own internal processes, remains unclear, and research has demonstrated large individual differences in introspective accuracy. It has been hypothesized that introspective accuracy may be heightened in persons who engage in meditation practices, due to the highly introspective nature of such practices. We...
While goal-directed thinking has received the lion's share of neuroscientific attention, its counterpart--the undirected thought flow that comes to mind unbidden and without effort--has remained largely on the sidelines of scientific research. Such undirected thought, however, forms a large part of our mental experience. The last decade of neuroscientific investigations marked a resurgence of...
Although mind wandering occupies a large proportion of our waking life, its neural basis and relation to ongoing behavior remain controversial. We report an fMRI study that used experience sampling to provide an online measure of mind wandering during a concurrent task. Analyses focused on the interval of time immediately preceding experience sampling probes demonstrate activation of default...