Where do our minds wander? Brainwaves can show the way

Someone who tries and can not meditate knows that our minds are seldom quiet. But where do they walk around? New research led by UC Berkeley has devised a way to track the flow of our internal thought processes and indicate whether our minds are focused, fixed, or erratic.

Using an electroencephalogram (EEG) to measure brain activity while humans were performing everyday attention tasks, researchers identified brain signals that revealed that the mind was not focused on the task or wandering aimlessly, especially after concentrating on a task.

Specifically, elevated alpha-brain waves were detected in the prefrontal cortex of more than two dozen study participants as their minds jumped from one subject to another, providing an electrophysiological signature for unlimited, spontaneous thinking. Alpha waves are slow brain rhythms that range in frequency from 9 to 14 cycles per second.

Meanwhile, weaker brain signals known as P3 have been observed in the parietal cortex, which further provides a neural marker for when people are not paying attention to the task.

“For the first time, we have neurophysiological evidence that distinguishes different patterns of internal thinking, enabling us to understand and compare the varieties of thinking that are central to human cognition between healthy and disordered thinking,” said senior author Robert Knight, a UC Berkeley, said professor of psychology and neuroscience.

The findings, presented this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences diary, suggests that aligning our external environment and allowing our internal thoughts to move freely and creatively is an essential function of the brain and it can promote relaxation and exploration.

Furthermore, EEC markers of how our minds flow as our brains rest can help researchers and clinicians detect certain thought patterns, even before patients are aware of where their minds are going.

“It can help detect thought patterns linked to a spectrum of psychiatric and attention disorders and can help diagnose them,” said lead author Julia Kam, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Calgary. She launched the study as a postdoctoral researcher in Knight’s Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at UC Berkeley.

Another co-author of the article is Zachary Irving, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Virginia who researched the psychological and philosophical underpinnings of wandering as a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley.

“If you focus on your goals all the time, you may be missing important information. So having a free association thought process that generates random memories and imaginative experiences can lead you to new ideas and insights,” said Irving, whose philosophical theory said. mindset shaped the methodology of the study.

Irving is working with Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist at UC Berkeley and Philosophy, who is also co-author of the study.

“It seems like babies and young children’s minds are constantly wandering, so we wondered what functions it could serve,” Gopnik said. “Our paper suggests that wandering movement is as much a positive feature of cognition as a peculiarity and it explains something we all experience.”

To prepare for the study, 39 adults were taught the difference between four different categories of thinking: task-related, free-moving, intentionally restricted, and automatically restricted.

While wearing electrodes on their heads that measured their brain activity, they sat at a computer screen and tapped the left or right arrow to match the left and right arrows that appeared in random rows on the screen.

When they completed a series, they were asked to rate on a scale of one to seven – whether their thoughts during the task related to the task, moving freely, being deliberately restricted or automatically restricted.

One example of thoughts that are not related to the task and to move freely would be if a student instead of studying for an upcoming exam, think about whether she is a good mark for an assignment got, and then realized that she had not yet prepared a dinner, and then wondered if she should exercise more and finally remember her last vacation, Kam said.

The answers to the questions about thought processes were then divided into the four groups and corresponded to the recorded brain activity.

When study participants reported that they had thoughts moving freely from subject to subject, they showed an increase in alpha wave activity in the frontal cortex of the brain, a pattern linked to the generation of creative ideas. Researchers also found evidence of inferior P3 brain signals during thoughts outside the task.

“The ability to detect our thought patterns through brain activity is an important step toward developing potential strategies to regulate how our minds unfold over time, a strategy that is helpful to healthy and disordered minds,” said Kam.