The Neuroscience of Spontaneous Thought: An Evolving, Interdisciplinary Field

TL;DR

This paper reviews the interdisciplinary neuroscience of spontaneous thought, emphasizing its dynamic properties and proposing a broader framework that includes mind-wandering, dreaming, and creativity as unconstrained mental states.

Contribution

It introduces a new framework for understanding spontaneous thought, integrating psychological, philosophical, and neuroscientific perspectives, and highlights the need for further research on its dynamic nature.

Findings

Spontaneous thoughts arise and transition freely due to lack of constraints.

Current research often overlooks the processes constraining thought emergence.

A call for more studies on the dynamic properties of mind and brain.

Abstract

An often-overlooked characteristic of the human mind is its propensity to wander. Despite growing interest in the science of mind-wandering, most studies operationalize mind-wandering by its task-unrelated contents, which may be orthogonal to the processes constraining how thoughts are evoked and unfold over time. In this chapter, we emphasize the importance of incorporating such processes into current definitions of mind-wandering, and proposing that mind-wandering and other forms of spontaneous thought (such as dreaming and creativity) are mental states that arise and transition relatively freely due to an absence of constraints on cognition. We review existing psychological, philosophical, and neuroscientific research on spontaneous thought through the lens of this framework, and call for additional research into the dynamic properties of the mind and brain.