High-level Prediction of Continuous Speech During Mind-Wandering
bioRxiv Preprint Server August 29, 2025 Gal R. Chen, Rachel Finkelstein, Ariel Goldstein et al. preprint
Even when people's minds wander while listening to an audiobook, their brains continue to predict upcoming words. In 25 participants listening to over 12,000 words of an audiobook, mind-wandering reduced early brain responses to word onsets and altered EEG spectral patterns, but neural markers of word-level surprise and semantic content remained intact. The brain's encoding of predictive context persisted during mind-wandering, though weaker than during attentive listening. This suggests that the brain predicts and monitors speech even when subjective experience is dimmed, indicating that shared computational mechanisms with language models are insufficient for conscious experience of meaning.