Neuroscience of Consciousness
2026
Asa Young, Marissa Ericson, Jonathan W. Schooler
Consciousness is often treated as a property of the brain alone, yet accumulating evidence suggests that it is shaped by a recurrent dialogue between the brain and body. In this review, we discuss how cognition associated with consciousness-processes that define the observer, their observations, and arising qualia-depend on structured rhythmic correspondences between bodily rhythms and brain...
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
May 5, 2025
Joshua R. Ortega, Madeleine E. Gross, Jonathan W. Schooler
1 citation
People with fantasy proneness and dispositions towards absorption and hypnotizability encounter waking thoughts that are particularly bizarre or dreamlike in nature. This suggests not only a continuity between dreaming and waking thoughts—what we refer to as continuity of thought—but perhaps stable individual differences in continuity of thought. The personality trait transliminality, which has...
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...
Possibility Studies & Society
September 1, 2024
Jonathan W. Schooler, Justin Riddle
3 citations
This essay reviews the discrepancies between the phenomenal experience of time and the characterization of time as it is currently conceptualized by modern physics. Three aspects of the subjective quality of time are identified: (1) the present is privileged and distinct from the past and future in that it is the exclusive time at which observers experience events as happening; (2) time flows...
Front Hum Neurosci
March 1, 2024
Tam Hunt, Mostyn Jones, Johnjoe Mcfadden et al.
11 citations
Editorial: Electromagnetic field theories of consciousness: opportunities and obstacles.
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2024
Justin Riddle, Jonathan W. Schooler
7 citations
Foremost in our experience is the intuition that we possess a unified conscious experience. However, many observations run counter to this intuition: we experience paralyzing indecision when faced with two appealing behavioral choices, we simultaneously hold contradictory beliefs, and the content of our thought is often characterized by an internal debate. Here, we propose the Nested Observer...
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews
October 1, 2023
Ruben Laukkonen, Margaret Webb, Carola Salvi et al.
Perhaps it is no accident that insight moments accompany some of humanity's most important discoveries in science, medicine, and art. Here we propose that feelings of insight play a central role in (heuristically) selecting an idea from the stream of consciousness by capturing attention and eliciting a sense of intuitive confidence permitting fast action under uncertainty. The mechanisms...
Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science
July 1, 2022
Tam Hunt, Marissa Ericson, Jonathan W. Schooler
52 citations
Tools and tests for measuring the presence and complexity of consciousness are becoming available, but there is no established theoretical approach for what these tools are measuring. This article examines several categories of tests for making reasonable inferences about the presence and complexity of consciousness (defined as the capacity for phenomenal/subjective experience) and also...
Journal of Psychopharmacology
February 1, 2022
Isabel Wießner, Marcelo Falchi-Carvalho, Lucas Oliveira Maia et al.
43 citations
Background: Controversy surrounds psychedelics and their potential to boost creativity. To date, psychedelic studies lack a uniform conceptualization of creativity and methodologically rigorous designs. Aims: This study aimed at addressing previous issues by examining the effects of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) on creativity using multimodal tasks and multidimensional approaches. Methods:...
Cognition & Emotion
August 1, 2021
Ruben Laukkonen, Daniel J Ingledew, Hilary J Grimmer et al.
Insight experiences are sudden, persuasive, and can accompany valuable new ideas in science and art. In this preregistered experiment, we aim to validate a novel visceral and continuous measure of insight problem solving and to test whether real-time and embodied feelings of insight can predict correct solutions. We report several findings. Consistent with recent work, we find a strong positive...
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...
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences
December 13, 2020
Madeleine E. Gross, Anna Smith, Yvette M. Graveline et al.
37 citations
Humans spend a considerable portion of their lives engaged in 'stimulus-independent thoughts' (SIT), or mental activity that occurs independently of input from the immediate external environment. Although such SITs are, by definition, different from thoughts that are driven by stimuli in one's external environment (i.e. stimulus-dependent thoughts; SDTs), at times, the phenomenology of these...
Education Sciences
August 31, 2019
Alissa J. Mrazek, Michael D. Mrazek, Jordan V. Reese et al.
17 citations
Digital mindfulness-based interventions (d-MBIs) present an unprecedented opportunity to share mindfulness training at scale. However, the feasibility of digital mindfulness training for high schools remains unknown. Using a one-group pre–post design, this feasibility study evaluated the adoption of a digital mindfulness course in a public high school. The 22-day course was delivered on...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
2019
Tam Hunt, Jonathan W. Schooler
Synchronization, harmonization, vibrations, or simply resonance in its most general sense seems to have an integral relationship with consciousness itself. One of the possible "neural correlates of consciousness" in mammalian brains is a specific combination of gamma, beta and theta electrical synchrony. More broadly, we see similar kinds of resonance patterns in living and non-living...
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
October 25, 2016
Benjamin W. Mooneyham, Michael D. Mrazek, Alissa J. Mrazek et al.
95 citations
During tasks that require continuous engagement, the mind alternates between mental states of focused attention and mind-wandering. Existing research has assessed the functional connectivity of intrinsic brain networks underlying the experience and training of these mental states using "static" approaches that assess connectivity across an entire task. To disentangle the different functional...
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...
Frontiers in Psychology
June 17, 2015
Claire M. Zedelius, Jonathan W. Schooler
124 citations
Based on mixed results linking both mindfulness and its opposing construct mind wandering to enhanced creativity, we predicted that the relationship between mindfulness and creativity might depend on whether creative problems are approached through analytic strategy or through "insight" (i.e., sudden awareness of a solution). Study 1 investigated the relationship between trait mindfulness and...
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...
Journal of experimental psychology. General
October 1, 2014
Benjamin Baird, Michael D. Mrazek, Dawa T. Phillips et al.
Contemplative mental practices aim to enable individuals to develop greater awareness of their own cognitive and affective states through repeated examination of first-person experience. Recent cross-sectional studies of long-term meditation practitioners suggest that the subjective reports of such individuals are better calibrated with objective indices; however, the impact of mental training...
Frontiers in Psychology
August 22, 2014
Michael S. Franklin, Stephen Baumgart, Jonathan W. Schooler
18 citations
OPINION article Front. Psychol., 22 August 2014Sec. Perception Science Volume 5 - 2014 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00907
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...
Psychological Science
March 28, 2013
Michael D. Mrazek, Michael S. Franklin, Dawa T. Phillips et al.
1,067 citations
Given that the ability to attend to a task without distraction underlies performance in a wide variety of contexts, training one's ability to stay on task should result in a similarly broad enhancement of performance. In a randomized controlled investigation, we examined whether a 2-week mindfulness-training course would decrease mind wandering and improve cognitive performance. Mindfulness...
Neuroimage
December 20, 2012
Jonathan Smallwood, Christine M. Tipper, Kevin Brown et al.
145 citations
Cognition that is not based on perception can lead to at least two different outcomes. In some situations, cognition that is independent of perception can allow actions to be selected other than those prescribed by immediate perceptual input. In others, cognition can be independent of perception and unrelated to the current behavioral goal allowing thoughts to develop that are largely...
PLoS One
April 6, 2012
Jonathan Smallwood, Kevin Brown, Benjamin Baird et al.
92 citations
Although consciousness can be brought to bear on both perceptual and internally generated information, little is known about how these different cognitive modes are coordinated. Here we show that between-participant variance in thoughts unrelated to the task being performed (known as task unrelated thought, TUT) is associated with longer response times (RT) when target presentation occurs...
Emotion
February 6, 2012
Michael D. Mrazek, Jonathan Smallwood, Jonathan W. Schooler
604 citations
Research into both mindfulness and mind-wandering has grown rapidly, yet clarification of the relationship between these two seemingly opposing constructs is still absent. A first study addresses the relationship between a dispositional measure of mindfulness (Mindful Attention and Awareness Scale, MAAS) and converging measures of both self-reported and indirect markers of mind-wandering....