Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
April 14, 2026
Meichao Zhang, Casey Paquola, Katya Krieger-Redwood et al.
Everyday cognition depends on the brain's capacity to shift between sensing the external world and constructing it from memory. To achieve this, large-scale cortical systems must flexibly integrate incoming sensory signals with internally generated representations. Here, we show that this flexibility is reflected in the macroscale architecture of the default mode network (DMN). Using convergent...
Consciousness and Cognition
February 1, 2025
Anusha Garg, Shivang Shelat, Madeleine E. Gross et al.
13 citations
Asking participants to Think Aloud is a common method for studying conscious experience, but it remains unclear whether this approach alters thought qualities-such as meta-awareness, rate of topic shifts, or the content of thoughts in task-absent conditions. To investigate this, we conducted two studies comparing thinking aloud to thinking silently. In Study 1, 111 participants alternated...
Nature Neuroscience
January 28, 2025
Casey Paquola, Margaret Garber, Stefan Frässle et al.
58 citations
The default mode network (DMN) is implicated in many aspects of complex thought and behavior. Here, we leverage postmortem histology and in vivo neuroimaging to characterize the anatomy of the DMN to better understand its role in information processing and cortical communication. Our results show that the DMN is cytoarchitecturally heterogenous, containing cytoarchitectural types that are...
Journal of Neuroscience
April 8, 2024
Ximing Shao, Katya Krieger-Redwood, Meichao Zhang et al.
20 citations
The default mode network (DMN) typically deactivates to external tasks, yet supports semantic cognition. It comprises medial temporal (MT), core, and frontotemporal (FT) subsystems, but its functional organization is unclear: the requirement for perceptual coupling versus decoupling, input modality (visual/verbal), type of information (social/spatial), and control demands all potentially affect...
Biological Psychiatry
February 1, 2023
Anne Maj van der Velden, Jacqueline Scholl, Else-Marie Elmholdt et al.
Depression is a leading cause of disability worldwide and its prevalence is on the rise. One of the most debilitating aspects of depression is the dominance and persistence of depressive rumination, a state of mind that is linked to onset and recurrence of depression. Mindfulness meditation trains adaptive attention regulation and present-moment embodied awareness, skills that may be...
Neuroimage
April 25, 2022
Manesh Girn, Leor Roseman, Boris C. Bernhardt et al.
112 citations
Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and psilocybin are serotonergic psychedelic compounds with potential in the treatment of mental health disorders. Past neuroimaging investigations have revealed that both compounds can elicit significant changes to whole-brain functional organization and dynamics. A recent proposal linked past findings into a unified model and hypothesized reduced whole-brain...
Nature reviews. Neuroscience
July 5, 2021
Jonathan Smallwood, Boris C. Bernhardt, Robert Leech et al.
970 citations
The default mode network (DMN) is a set of widely distributed brain regions in the parietal, temporal and frontal cortex. These regions often show reductions in activity during attention-demanding tasks but increase their activity across multiple forms of complex cognition, many of which are linked to memory or abstract thought. Within the cortex, the DMN has been shown to be located in regions...
iScience
February 2, 2021
Jonathan Smallwood, Adam Turnbull, Hao-ting Wang et al.
130 citations
A core goal in cognitive neuroscience is identifying the physical substrates of the patterns of thought that occupy our daily lives. Contemporary views suggest that the landscape of ongoing experience is heterogeneous and can be influenced by features of both the person and the context. This perspective piece considers recent work that explicitly accounts for both the heterogeneity of the...
Scientific Reports
December 3, 2020
Theodoros Karapanagiotidis, Diego Vidaurre, Andrew J. Quinn et al.
82 citations
When unoccupied by an explicit external task, humans engage in a wide range of different types of self-generated thinking. These are often unrelated to the immediate environment and have unique psychological features. Although contemporary perspectives on ongoing thought recognise the heterogeneity of these self-generated states, we lack both a clear understanding of how to classify the...
Neuroimage
June 22, 2020
Brontë Mckeown, Will Strawson, Hao-ting Wang et al.
102 citations
Contemporary accounts of ongoing thought recognise it as a heterogeneous and multidimensional construct, varying in both form and content. An emerging body of evidence demonstrates that distinct types of experience are associated with unique neurocognitive profiles, that can be described at the whole-brain level as interactions between multiple large-scale networks. The current study sought to...
Neuroimage
June 6, 2020
Lucilla Lanzoni, Daniela Ravasio, H. Thompson et al.
Recent accounts of large-scale cortical organisation suggest that the default mode network (DMN) is positioned at the top of a principal gradient, reflecting the separation between heteromodal and unimodal sensory-motor regions in patterns of connectivity and in geodesic distance along the cortical surface (Margulies et al., 2016). This isolation of DMN from external inputs might allow the...
Scientific Reports
November 7, 2019
Meichao Zhang, Nicola Savill, Daniel S. Margulies et al.
48 citations
Often, as we read, we find ourselves thinking about something other than the text; this tendency to mind-wander is linked to poor comprehension and reduced subsequent memory for texts. Contemporary accounts argue that periods of off-task thought are related to the tendency for attention to be decoupled from external input. We used fMRI to understand the neural processes that underpin this...
Nature Communications
August 23, 2019
Adam Turnbull, Hao-ting Wang, Charlotte Murphy et al.
197 citations
When environments lack compelling goals, humans often let their minds wander to thoughts with greater personal relevance; however, we currently do not understand how this context-dependent prioritisation process operates. Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) maintains goal representations in a context-dependent manner. Here, we show this region is involved in prioritising off-task thought in...
Neuroimage
May 15, 2019
Léa M Martinon, Jonathan Smallwood, Deborah McGann et al.
Human cognition is not limited to the processing of events in the external environment, and the covert nature of certain aspects of the stream of consciousness (e.g. experiences such as mind-wandering) provides a methodological challenge. Although research has shown that we spend a substantial amount of time focused on thoughts and feelings that are intrinsically generated, evaluating such...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
August 27, 2018
Mladen Sormaz, Charlotte Murphy, Hao-ting Wang et al.
291 citations
Regions of transmodal cortex, in particular the default mode network (DMN), have historically been argued to serve functions unrelated to task performance, in part because of associations with naturally occurring periods of off-task thought. In contrast, contemporary views of the DMN suggest it plays an integrative role in cognition that emerges from its location at the top of a cortical...
Neuroimage
January 12, 2018
Charlotte Murphy, Elizabeth Jefferies, Shirley-Ann Rueschemeyer et al.
288 citations
The default mode network supports a variety of mental operations such as semantic processing, episodic memory retrieval, mental time travel and mind-wandering, yet the commonalities between these functions remains unclear. One possibility is that this system supports cognition that is independent of the immediate environment; alternatively or additionally, it might support higher-order...
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
March 21, 2017
Giulia Poerio, Mladen Sormaz, Hao-ting Wang et al.
185 citations
Experiences such as mind-wandering illustrate that cognition is not always tethered to events in the here-and-now. Although converging evidence emphasises the default mode network (DMN) in mind-wandering, its precise contribution remains unclear. The DMN comprises cortical regions that are maximally distant from primary sensory and motor cortex, a topological location that may support the...
PLoS One
August 25, 2016
Jonathan Smallwood, Theodoros Karapanagiotidis, Florence Ruby et al.
When not engaged in the moment, we often spontaneously represent people, places and events that are not present in the environment. Although this capacity has been linked to the default mode network (DMN), it remains unclear how interactions between the nodes of this network give rise to particular mental experiences during spontaneous thought. One hypothesis is that the core of the DMN...
Psychology of Consciousness Theory Research and Practice
March 1, 2016
Anthony P Zanesco, Brandon G King, Katherine A Maclean et al.
61 citations
It is challenging for individuals to maintain their attention on ongoing cognitive tasks without being distracted by task-unrelated thought. The wandering mind is thus a considerable obstacle when attention must be maintained over time. Mental training through meditation has been proposed as an effective method of attenuating the ebb and flow of attention to thoughts and feelings that distract...
PLoS One
June 30, 2015
Mahiko Konishi, Donald George McLaren, Haakon Engen et al.
210 citations
Although many different accounts of the functions of the default mode network (DMN) have been proposed, few can adequately account for the spectrum of different cognitive functions that utilize this network. The current study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to explore the hypothesis that the role of the DMN in higher order cognition is to allow cognition to be shaped by...
Annual Review of Psychology
January 3, 2015
Jonathan Smallwood, Jonathan W. Schooler
Conscious experience is fluid; it rarely remains on one topic for an extended period without deviation. Its dynamic nature is illustrated by the experience of mind wandering, in which attention switches from a current task to unrelated thoughts and feelings. Studies exploring the phenomenology of mind wandering highlight the importance of its content and relation to meta-cognition in...
PLoS One
May 13, 2014
Krzysztof J. Gorgolewski, Daniel J. Lurie, Sebastian Urchs et al.
180 citations
Although neural activity often reflects the processing of external inputs, intrinsic fluctuations in activity have been observed throughout the brain. These may relate to patterns of self-generated thought that can occur while not performing goal-driven tasks. To understand the relationship between self-generated mental activity and intrinsic neural fluctuations, we developed the New York...
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
April 17, 2014
Benjamin Baird, Jonathan Smallwood, Antoine Lutz et al.
169 citations
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...
Frontiers in Psychology
2013
Jonathan Smallwood, Jessica R Andrews-Hanna
441 citations
The waking mind is often occupied with mental contents that are minimally constrained by events in the here and now. These self-generated thoughts-e.g., mind-wandering or daydreaming-interfere with external task performance and can be a marker for unhappiness and even psychiatric problems. They also occupy our thoughts for upwards of half of the time, and under non-demanding conditions they (i)...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
2013
Micah Allen, Jonathan Smallwood, Joanna Christensen et al.
100 citations
Self-generated thoughts unrelated to ongoing activities, also known as "mind-wandering," make up a substantial portion of our daily lives. Reports of such task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs) predict both poor performance on demanding cognitive tasks and blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) activity in the default mode network (DMN). However, recent findings suggest that TUTs and the DMN can also...