Notre article sur le vide mental a les honneurs du @lemonde.fr !
Merci @hnirom.bsky.social pour ce bel article !
www.lemonde.fr/sciences/art...
I hope to have time soon to write a little thread on this, but for now here's the PsyArXiv link to a new preprint from our lab on the construct validity of probed mind-blanking reports. Chandni Lal will be presenting this work as a poster at the upcoming Psychonomics meeting.
How I imagine it must be like to work in a small university town
🧪 Our new study on decoding #MindBlanking events started yesterday. The pilot was successful, and we now fine-tune the details. Led by @agusaragon.bsky.social, with the precious assistance of #NikosSimos and @b-marion.bsky.social
Our lab participated at the meeting of the #BelgianSocietyofNeuroscience last Monday, which was a blast. Thank you for bringing us to Leuven this year. W/ @parboulakis.bsky.social @agusaragon.bsky.social @b-marion.bsky.social @ademertzi.bsky.social
I would also like to thank @physiocognition.bsky.social, @giga-crc-hi.bsky.social @universitedeliege.bsky.social and FRS-FNRS (www.frs-fnrs.be) for funding and supporting my research.
This was a deeply collaborative work, and as such I would like to express my thanks to supervisor @ademertzi.bsky.social and my collaborators for this project @thomasandrillon.bsky.social @naotsuchiya.bsky.social @anikokusztor.bsky.social.
Our findings build on the quest to bridge mental content and its absence with measurable brain activity and provide insights into how ongoing thinking is maintained during wakefulness.
Together, where do we stand with these findings? 🤔
By bridging such multimodal neural information, we overall conclude that “thought-less” mental states come in different types (as recently hypothesised in Andrillon, 2025 🤯)!
5) Finally, a Canonical Correlations Analysis between EEG SW-like activity and fMRI connectivity patterns showed that larger SW amplitude and steeper downslope correlated with the hyperconnected brain pattern.
4) Here is the catch: the brain organised similar to the “rich” P1 during MB and alertness reports. BUT, during low vigilance, the brain resembled the overconnected P5. Critically, the brain resembled P5 during MB too, but only when participants reported being alert.
3) Using K-Means clustering, we found that time-varying functional connectivity could be summarised in five connectivity patterns. These varied from patterns of anticorrelations (P1-3) to patterns with weak synchronization (P4) and overall global synchronization (P5).
2) When we examined the fMRI global signal (GS) amplitude, a proxy for cortical arousal, both MB and low vigilance were associated with higher GS amplitude, as in Mortaheb 2022.
We found:
1) while MB occurred infrequently, the probability of reporting MB increased when participants reported sleepiness.
During the SART, participants were probed about their thoughts (on-task, off-task, or blank) and their alertness level (high or low).
❓ Could it be that SW-like activity and fMRI hyperconnectivity during MB reflect two sides of the same coin and that more fine-grained neural fingerprints of MB exist🎯 We utilised joint EEG-fMRI and experience sampling during a sustained attention task (SART) in healthy participants (n=38)
We also know that MB is related to a fMRI brain pattern of overall positive connectivity (Mortaheb, 2022).
To date, we know that the EEG correlates of MB resemble slow-wave-like (SW) activity, typically observed in NREM sleep, termed “local sleeps” (Andrillon, 2021).
Mind blanking (MB) is a mental state in which individuals have no mental content to report or are unable to report any content (Boulakis & Demertzi, 2025). But how is it possible to be conscious and yet have nothing in the mind? Perhaps the brain holds the answer 🤔
🚨Preprint alert 🚨. Our work “Distinct cortical profiles underlie the common reportability of thought-free experiences” is available at www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1.... 🧵A thread ...
I would also like to thank @physiocognition.bsky.social @giga-crc-hi.bsky.social @universitedeliege.bsky.social and FNRS (frs-fnrs.be) for funding and supporting my research.
This was a deeply collaborative work, and as such I would like to express my thanks to supervisor @ademertzi.bsky.social and my collaborators for this project @thomasandrillon.bsky.social @naotsuchiya.bsky.social @anikokusztor.bsky.social.
Our findings build on the quest to bridge thought content and its absence with measurable brain activity and provide insights into how ongoing thinking is maintained during wakefulness.
Together, where do we stand with these findings? 🤔
By bridging such multimodal neural information, we overall conclude that “thought-less” mental states come in different types( as recently hypothesised🤯 Andrillon, 2025).
6) Finally, a Canonical Correlations Analysis between EEG SW-like activity and fMRI connectivity patterns showed that larger SW amplitude and steeper downslope correlated with the hyperconnected brain pattern.
4) Here is the catch: the brain organised similar to the “rich” P1 during MB and alertness reports. BUT, during low vigilance, the brain resembled the hyperconnected P5. Critically, the brain resembled P5 during MB too, but only when participants reported being alert.
3) Using K-Means clustering, we found that time-varying functional connectivity could be summarised in five connectivity patterns. These varied from patterns of anticorrelations (P1-3) to patterns with weak synchronization (P4) and overall global synchronization (P5).
2) When we examined the fMRI global signal (GS) amplitude, a proxy for cortical arousal, both MB and low vigilance were associated with higher GS amplitude, as in Mortaheb 2022.
We found:
1) while MB occured infrequently, the probability of reporting MB increased when participants reported sleepiness.
During the SART, participants were probed about their thoughts (on-task, off-task, or blank) and their alertness level (high or low).
