When the Mind Goes Blank — What Happens When Your Brain Briefly Goes Offline
Your mind is usually busy — replaying conversations, planning dinner, worrying about tomorrow, narrating the present. But every so often, that activity seems to stop. There’s no thought to follow and no image to latch onto. For a brief moment, awareness itself feels empty.
Moments like these are often treated as lapses in attention or memory. New findings suggest they instead reflect brief interruptions in conscious experience itself — transient states that occur during wakefulness and are marked by measurable changes in brain activity. The work, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that consciousness does not always align neatly with being awake, and that these interruptions may be a regular feature of everyday awareness.
“Mind blanking is likely an extremely common occurrence, during which certain brain regions briefly slip into a sleep-like state. We estimate it accounts for 5 to 20 [percent] of waking hours, although there are significant differences between individuals,” said the study authors in a press release.
The Elusive Nature of Mind Blanking
Despite growing interest, researchers still don’t fully agree on what qualifies as mind blanking. At its core, the term refers to episodes in which people report an inability to describe any mental content at all — not because it’s fleeting or hard to articulate, but because it seems absent altogether.
“Mind blanking is defined as the complete absence of mental content that can be described to others. No mental images, no catchy tune looping in your head, no obsessive thoughts […] nothing! This experience is often sought after by practitioners of meditation or mindfulness. But it isn’t confined to them: it seems to be very common after intense, prolonged cognitive effort — such as a university exam — or in cases of sleep deprivation,” said Esteban Munoz-Musat, neurologist, and study co-author.
Beyond everyday fatigue, mind blanking also appears in clinical settings. Previous work has linked it to conditions such as generalized anxiety disorder, and it has been reported more frequently in people with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
Read More: ADHD Is Difficult to Diagnose, But Getting the Right Treatment Is Crucial
Tracking Mind Blanking With Brain Recordings
To capture mind blanking as it unfolded, the researchers designed an experiment that placed prolonged demands on attention. They recorded the brain activity, using high-density electroencephalography (hdEEG), of 62 healthy volunteers who completed extended, repetitive tasks. Participants were also periodically asked to report what had been going through their mind just before each prompt.
When participants said their minds were blank, their brains behaved differently than when they were focused on the task or drifting into unrelated thoughts. Large-scale communication across the brain weakened, suggesting that distant regions were no longer working in sync. At the same time, the brain’s handling of incoming visual information changed.
In particular, neural activity tied to later stages of visual processing — often linked to conscious awareness — was diminished or missing altogether. These moments also came with subtle behavioral shifts: participants tended to respond more slowly, made more mistakes, and appeared less alert.
“These observations suggest that during a mind blanking episode, participants had reduced access to sensory information from their environment,” said Thomas Andrillon, senior author of the study. “These new data support an emerging idea: being awake does not necessarily mean being conscious of something. Mind blanking corresponds to a genuine interruption in the stream of thoughts.”
A Mosaic View of Conscious Experience
Future studies will explore whether mind blanking could help refine how certain neurological or psychiatric conditions are understood, as well as shed new light on how attention and awareness fluctuate in the brain.
“Our findings suggest that the structure of conscious experience is more like a mosaic of discrete states rather than a continuous mental film. A mosaic in which the absence of certain tiles results in brief moments of unconsciousness when the subject is awake,” said Lionel Naccache, neurologist and co-author of the study.
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