Scientists Discover Consciousness May Actually 'Pause'
Study Finds••health
Key Points:
- Researchers at Sorbonne Université identified "mind blanking" as a distinct mental state characterized by brief lapses in consciousness where the brain processes sensory input but fails to bring it to awareness, occurring about 16% of the time during attention tasks.
- Brain activity during mind blanking showed a unique front-versus-back dissociation, with increased fast activity in the frontal brain and decreased activity in visual processing areas, contrasting with patterns seen during mind wandering.
- Visual stimuli triggered normal early brain responses across mental states, but during mind blanking, later neural responses linked to conscious perception were disrupted, indicating that visual information reached the eyes but not conscious awareness.
- Machine learning classifiers trained on brain data could predict mental states, including mind blanking,
