
What happens when you are not thinking about anything? (fizkes/Shutterstock)
In a nutshell
- Mind blanking is real, and it’s not just zoning out. Neuroscientists have identified it as a distinct mental state where the brain shows reduced activity and people experience an absence of thought or awareness.
- Your brain might be taking “mini-naps.” During mind blanking, parts of the brain appear to enter a sleep-like state while you’re still awake, suggesting the brain sometimes goes partially offline without you realizing it.
- These mental blackouts may have clinical and cognitive relevance. Mind blanking happens more often in people with ADHD and is even mentioned in anxiety disorder diagnostics, hinting at its broader importance in understanding consciousness and attention.
LIÈGE, Belgium — Those moments when your brain seemingly shuts down mid-conversation aren’t just embarrassing social hiccups or “brain farts”; neuroscientists now recognize them as “mind blanking.” That peculiar mental void, where you’re not daydreaming about vacation or mentally composing your grocery list, is a legitimate cognitive phenomenon with its own neural signature.
Scientists have discovered this strange mental state isn’t just a quirk of human experience but represents a distinct pattern in your brain. In fact, these mental “blackouts” might be closer to microsleep than previously thought, suggesting our brains occasionally take unauthorized mini-breaks throughout the day.
A team of international neuroscientists recently published their findings in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, arguing that mind blanking deserves serious scientific attention as its own unique mental state, not simply a failure of attention or memory.
“The experience of a ‘blank mind’ is as intimate and direct as that of bearing thoughts,” says author Jennifer Windt of Monash University, in a statement.
The researchers examined what happens during these momentary mental blanks when we seem to experience nothing at all. Their work raises fundamental questions about the continuous nature of human consciousness.
Consciousness is often thought of as an uninterrupted stream of thoughts. Instead, consciousness appears to have natural gaps, moments when our minds contain virtually nothing at all.
“Our aim here is to start a conversation and see how mind blanking relates to other seemingly similar experiences, such as meditation,” adds author Antoine Lutz of the Lyon Neuroscience Research Center in France.
Most people report experiencing mind blanking about 5-20% of the time during typical tasks. That’s significantly less common than mind wandering (which happens roughly three times as often), but frequent enough to warrant investigation. Interestingly, individuals with ADHD report more frequent mind blanks than neurotypical people.
The research team combined brain imaging techniques like fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) and EEG (electroencephalography) with behavioral studies to understand what happens during mind blanking episodes. They found that mind blanking has distinct neural signatures that differentiate it from both focused attention and mind wandering.
During mind blanking, researchers observed widespread deactivation across the brain, along with slow, sleep-like waves, similar to what happens during the transition between wakefulness and sleep. This suggests mind blanking might actually represent a state of “local sleep,” where certain regions of your brain briefly go offline while you remain generally awake and responsive, like small parts of your brain taking a quick nap while the rest stays on duty.
Your body provides additional clues. Before reporting mind blanks, study participants showed decreased heart rates and smaller pupil sizes, indicating reduced physiological arousal. They also made more errors on tasks and responded more slowly, displaying a pattern of behavioral sluggishness not seen with mind wandering.
In this in-between state, a person maintains some minimal level of awareness but experiences almost no mental content. This helps explain why these episodes feel different from both normal wakefulness and sleep.
Unlike the empty-mind state cultivated through meditation, spontaneous mind blanking typically involves reduced awareness rather than heightened attention. And unlike white dreams (where you know you dreamed but can’t recall the content), mind blanking occurs during wakefulness rather than sleep.
Some mind blanks might result from memory failures (where thoughts occurred but weren’t remembered), some from language processing issues (where thoughts existed but couldn’t be verbalized), and others from true absence of thought. Various forms might also be spontaneous or deliberately induced.
So what causes your mind to suddenly blank out? When arousal dips slightly, neural communication patterns change in ways that either prevent thoughts from forming or block conscious access to them. Various things like memory, attention, and language processing may then determine exactly how mind blanking manifests.
Mind blanking is mentioned in the diagnostic criteria for generalized anxiety disorder, and similar experiences occur in conditions like autoactivation deficit syndrome (a rare neurological condition affecting motivation and spontaneous action) and certain sleep disorders.
If you have a brain fart and your mind goes completely blank every once in a while, you’re not broken or unusual. Your brain is likely just taking a momentary mini-vacation, entering a distinct neural state that scientists are only beginning to understand.
Paper Summary
Methodology
The researchers conducted a comprehensive review of existing literature on mind blanking and related contentless experiences. They analyzed neurophysiological studies using fMRI and EEG to examine brain activity during mind blanking episodes, as well as behavioral studies measuring response times and error rates. They compared reports of mind blanking with adjacent phenomena like meditation and dreamless sleep. The researchers explored various methods for measuring mind blanking, including experience sampling (where participants are randomly prompted to report their mental state), self-caught methodology (where participants report when they notice mind blanking), and hybrid approaches. They also examined the neurophysiological correlates of mind blanking through brain imaging studies that weren’t explicitly instructing participants to induce mind blanking.
Results
The research found that mind blanking occurs in about 5-20% of probed instances during cognitive tasks, compared to mind wandering which occurs about three times more frequently. Mind blanking showed distinct behavioral patterns compared to mind wandering, including slower responses, more omission errors, and reports of feeling sleepier. Neurologically, mind blanking was associated with widespread brain deactivations, a decrease in EEG signal complexity over parietal electrodes, increased delta power, disrupted frontoparietal connectivity, and the presence of sleep-like slow waves. Physiologically, mind blanking correlated with decreased heart rate and pupil size. The researchers proposed that mind blanking occurs at an intermediate arousal level between wakefulness and sleep, representing a state of “local sleep” where parts of the brain briefly go offline while the person remains generally responsive.
Limitations
The study acknowledges several limitations and outstanding questions. Currently, there’s no definitive methodology for reliably measuring mind blanking, and different research approaches may target different phenomena under the umbrella term “mind blanking.” It remains unclear whether mind blanking represents a single phenomenon or a family of related experiences with different underlying mechanisms. The researchers note that some episodes of mind blanking might go unreported because participants are unaware of them, potentially skewing results. The paper also raises questions about whether some forms of mind blanking could be intentionally cultivated through practice, similar to meditative states.
Funding & Disclosures
The work was supported by the European Research Council starting grant “SleepingAwake,” the French Research Agency Project “Connectomics, Ageing, and Med,” the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research, the EU Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Marie Skłodowska-Curie RISE programme “neuronsXnets,” the European Cooperation in Science and Technology COST Action “NeuralArchCon,” the Léon Fredericq Foundation, and the University of Liège. The authors declared no competing interests.
Publication Information
The paper titled “Where is my mind? A neurocognitive investigation of mind blanking” was authored by Thomas Andrillon, Antoine Lutz, Jennifer Windt, and Athena Demertzi. It was published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences in 2025 as an open access article under the CC BY-NC license.