If you just stare straight ahead and don’t seem to be thinking about anything – what exactly is going on in your head? A research team has taken on this question and found answers.
Sometimes, even when you are wide awake, you are absent inside. You let your thoughts wander, forget your own surroundings and often get a stare. If someone returns from this state to the moment, he or she can usually no longer say exactly what the thoughts were about. A research team from the Belgian Université de Liège has investigated what happens in the brain during this so-called “mind blanking”.
36 subjects lay in a brain scanner with their eyes open. At random intervals they heard a noise. Then they were asked to state what they were thinking about or what they had just focused their attention on. Very few said they felt complete emptiness in their heads.
In these few subjects, the researchers took a closer look at the brain activity with the help of artificial intelligence. According to the results, there is a specific pattern for mind blanking. In the meantime, different brain regions work more synchronously than usual. The researchers speak of “ultra connectivity”.
Why do people experience mind blanking?
According to GEO Magazine, mind blanking occurs when you are tired. After a hard day that required a lot of concentration, people often let their thoughts wander and focus on nothing concrete.
According to the researchers, the fact that people then feel a certain emptiness in their heads is probably due to the fact that people find it very difficult to add new information to their consciousness during mind blanking.
According to the science magazine Spektrum, however, there are also doubts about the validity of the study. After all, it cannot be confirmed with certainty that the subjects were actually in the state of mind blanking at the time of the noise. Maybe they just weren’t paying enough attention and therefore couldn’t say exactly whether they really hadn’t thought of anything or were just daydreaming after all.
Mind blanking and sleep
According to GEO, the current study is not the first to look more closely at mind blanking. In 2021, researchers from Melbourne, Australia, found that slower waves occurred in the brains of healthy, young people during mind blanking. These slow brain waves are also a characteristic feature of the sleep phase.
According to collaborating researcher Thomas Andrillon, these findings could indicate how sleep and wake phases are mixed up in our brains on a day-to-day basis. Humans are not necessarily always either in the sleeping or waking state, but can show characteristics of both states in different brain regions at the same time.
However, if mind blanking occurs at the wrong moment, it can also have dramatic consequences. Thus, people can also feel the phenomenon during an exam or a presentation. According to Andrillon, it occurs more often when someone is sleep deprived.
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