Search results for "Mind-wandering"

2013

This metatheoretical paper investigates mind wandering from the perspective of philosophy of mind. It has two central claims. The first is that on a conceptual level, mind wandering can be fruitfully described as a specific form of mental autonomy loss. The second is that most of what we call “conscious thought” is better analysed as a subpersonal process that more often than not lacks crucial properties traditionally taken to be the hallmark of personal-level cognition, such as mental agency, explicit, consciously experienced goal-directedness, or availability for veto control. I claim that for roughly two thirds of our life-time we do not possess mental autonomy (M-autonomy) in this sense…

Mind-wandering and mindfulness as mediators of the relationship between online vigilance and well-being

2018

Contains fulltext : 199030pub.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access) As mobile technology allows users to be online anywhere and at all times, a growing number of users report feeling constantly alert and preoccupied with online streams of online information and communication - a phenomenon that has recently been termed online vigilance. Despite its growing prevalence, consequences of this constant orientation toward online streams of information and communication for users' well-being are largely unclear. In the present study, we investigated whether being constantly vigilant is related to cognitive consequences in the form of increased mind-wandering and decreased mindfulness and exam…

Why Is Mind-Wandering Interesting for Philosophers?

2018

This chapter explores points of contact between philosophy of mind and scientific approaches to spontaneous thought. While offering a series of conceptual instruments that might prove helpful for researchers on the empirical research frontier, it begins by asking what the explanandum for theories of mind-wandering is, how one can conceptually individuate single occurrences of this specific target phenomenon, and how one might arrive at a more fine-grained taxonomy. The second half of this contribution sketches some positive proposals as to how one might understand mind-wandering on a conceptual level, namely, as a loss of mental autonomy resulting in involuntary mental behavior, as a highly…

The Family-Resemblances Framework for Mind-Wandering Remains Well Clad

2018

Christoff et al. [1] reject our family-resemblances framework for mind-wandering research [2] and instead seek to characterize mind-wandering with a necessary defining feature. As an example, they point to their ‘dynamic framework’ [3] that defines mind-wandering as thoughts that ‘proceed in a relatively free, unconstrained fashion.’ We outline three primary points of disagreement with their commentary and two points of clarification on the family-resemblances framework.

PCA-based source-space contrast maps reveal psychologically meaningful individual differences in continuous MEG activity

2019

AbstractWithin the field of neuroimaging, there has been an increasing trend towards studying brain activity in naturalistic conditions, and it is possible to robustly estimate networks of on-going oscillatory activity in the brain. However, not many studies have focused on differences between individuals in on-going brain activity that would be associable to psychological or behavioral characteristics. Existing standard methods can perform well at single-participant level, but generalizing the methodology across many participants is challenging due to individual differences of brains. As an example of a clinically relevant, naturalistic condition we consider here mindfulness. Trait mindful…