Researchers have 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,” says Robert Knight , a professor of psychology and neuroscience. at the University of California, Berkeley and senior author of the new study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The findings suggest that aligning our external environment and allowing our internal minds to move freely and creatively is an essential function of the brain and that 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 attentional 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.
If you focus on your goals all the time, you may be missing out on important information. If you have a free association thought process that generates memories and imaginative experiences, you can lead to new ideas and insights, ‘says co-author Zachary Irving, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Virginia, who teaches psychology and philosophical foundation of wandering as a postdoctoral academic at UC Berkeley. Irving’s philosophical theory of mindfulness shaped the methodology of the study.
“It seems that babies and young children’s minds are constantly wandering, so we asked ourselves what functions could serve, ‘says co-author Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist and philosophical scholar who is also co-author of the study. “Our article 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, deliberately or automatically restricted.
An example of thoughts that are not related to the task and can 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 not exercise more, and finally remembered her last vacation, says Kam.
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 track our thought patterns through brain activity is an important step in generating potential strategies to regulate how our minds unfold over time, a strategy that is helpful to healthy and disordered minds,” says Kam.
Additional co-authors are from UC Berkeley and the University of Hampshire.
Source: UC Berkeley