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Researchers have found a way to track the flow of our internal thought processes and signal whether our minds are focused, fixed, or wandering.
Using an electroencephalogram (EEG) to measure brain activity while people performed mundane attention tasks, researchers identified signals to the brain that reveal the mind is not focused on the task at hand or wandering around aimless, especially after focusing on a mission.
Specifically, an increase in alpha brain waves was detected in the prefrontal cortex of more than two dozen study participants as their thoughts jumped from subject to subject, providing an electrophysiological signature for spontaneous and unconstrained thinking. . Alpha waves are slow brain rhythms ranging in frequency from 9 to 14 cycles per second.
Meanwhile, weaker brain signals known as P3 have been observed in the parietal cortex, further providing a neural marker when people are not paying attention to the task at hand.
“For the first time, we have neurophysiological evidence that distinguishes different internal thought patterns, allowing us to understand the varieties of thought essential to human cognition and to compare healthy and disordered thinking,” says Robert Knight, professor of psychology and neuroscience. at the University of California, Berkeley and lead author of the new study, which will appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The results suggest that regulating our external environment and allowing our internal thoughts to move freely and creatively is a necessary brain function and can promote relaxation and exploration.
Plus, EEG markers of how our thoughts flow when our brains are at rest can help researchers and clinicians detect certain thought patterns, even before patients know where their minds are wandering.
“It could help detect and diagnose thought patterns related to a range of psychiatric and attention disorders,” says lead author Julia Kam, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Calgary. She initiated the study as a postdoctoral researcher in Knight’s Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at UC Berkeley.
“If you focus on your goals all the time, you may miss important information. And so, having an associative free thought process that randomly generates imaginative memories and experiences can lead you to new ideas and perspectives, ”says co-author Zachary Irving, assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Virginie who explored the psychological and philosophical foundations of mind-wandering as a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley. Irving’s philosophical theory of mental wandering shaped the methodology of the study.
“The minds of babies and toddlers seem to be constantly wandering, so we wondered what functions this could serve,” says co-author Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist and philosophy specialist who is also a co-author of the study. . “Our article suggests that mental wandering is as much a positive characteristic of cognition as it is an oddity, and explains something we all experience.
To prepare for the study, 39 adults learned the difference between four different categories of thinking: task-related, free-moving, deliberately constrained, and automatically constrained.
Then, while wearing electrodes on their heads that measured their brain activity, they sat in front of a computer screen and tapped the left or right arrow keys to match the left and right arrows appearing in random sequences on the l ‘screen.
When they completed a sequence, they were asked to rate on a scale of one to seven – whether their thoughts during the task had been task-related, moving freely, deliberately constrained, or automatically constrained.
An example of task-unrelated, free-moving thoughts would be if a student, instead of studying for an upcoming exam, wondered if she had received a good grade for an assignment, then realized that she hadn’t. not cooked dinner yet, and then wondered if she should exercise more and ended up remembering her last vacation, Kam says.
The responses to the thought process questions were then divided into four groups and compared to the recorded brain activity.
When study participants reported having thoughts that moved freely from subject to subject, they showed increased alpha wave activity in the frontal cortex of the brain, a pattern linked to the generation of ideas. creative. Researchers have also found evidence of lower brain P3 signals during off-task thoughts.
“The ability to detect our thought patterns through brain activity is an important step towards generating potential strategies to regulate the way our thoughts unfold over time, a useful strategy for healthy and disordered minds,” Kam said.
Other co-authors come from UC Berkeley and the University of Hampshire.
Source: UC Berkeley
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