Missing our own thoughts: Insights from Mind-Blanking

Meta-awareness, the awareness of the contents of our mental life, provides us with a monitoring mechanism to access, identify and monitor our stream of consciousness. Whether our minds drift through environmental stimuli, pay attention to a task or just wander, we are mostly aware of our thoughts. Occasionally however, this immediate awareness fails us. Self-catch and experience sampling methods have shown that people report an inability to access brief parts of their mental life, and through a reflective process of no mental experience, no thoughts. This peculiar phenomenological state is termed Mind-Blanking. In this presentation, we will be discussing behavioral, neuroimaging and computational advances in cases of “absence” reports to examine what may precede monitoring and access errors. In the first part, we will discuss findings on the role of specific brain connectivity patterns preceding blanking reports, paving the way for decoding access errors from neural activity. Interestingly, specific bodily contributions might guide these patterns, in line with recent embodied theories of meta-cognition. After that, we will examine how Bayesian models might be used to test potential mechanisms for absence reports. Examples from metacognition and confidence research provide us with evidence of perception-awareness decoupling metacognitive components that fail during access to consciousness. Finally, we will discuss cognitive and metacognitive components that might help us understand individual variation in how blanks occur, based on previous work on mind wandering.