Anyone who has tried and failed to think knows that our minds are rare. But where do they move? New research led by UC Berkeley has come up with a way to track the flow of our internal thought processes and identify whether our minds are focused, settled or distracted.
Using electroencephalogram (EEG) to measure brain activity while people were performing heavy attention tasks, researchers identified brain signals that appear when the mind is not focused on the activity or going aimlessly, especially after focusing on assignment.
Notably, more alpha brain waves were detected in the prefrontal cortex of more than two dozen study participants when their thoughts jumped from one subject to another, providing an electrophysiologic signal for unrestricted, unbridled thinking. Alpha waves are slow brain rhythms that have a frequency ranging from 9 to 14 cycles per second.
At the same time, weaker brain signals called P3 have been observed in the parietal cortex, offering a more neural signal when people do not pay attention to the available activity.
“For the first time, we have neurophysiologic evidence that differentiates different patterns of inner thinking, allowing us to understand the types of thinking that are at the heart of human experience and to make comparisons. between healthy thinking and disorder, “said senior study author Robert Knight, a UC Berkeley. professor of psychology and neurology.
The findings, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences magazine, suggests that tuning our outdoor environment and allowing our inner thoughts to move freely and creatively is an essential function of the brain and can promote relaxation and study.
In addition, EEG signals on how our thoughts flow when our brains are at rest can help researchers and clinicians detect specific thought patterns, even before patients are aware of where does the mind go.
“This may help to identify thought patterns related to a spectrum of mental and attention disorders and may help to detect them,” said the study’s lead author Julia Kam, a professor of psychology at the University of Calgary . She launched the study as a graduate researcher in the Knight psychology laboratory at UC Berkeley.
Another co-author of the paper is Zachary Irving, a professor of philosophy at the University of Virginia who studied the psychological and philosophical foundations of mind travel as a graduate scholar at UC Berkeley.
“If you focus all the time on your goals, you can lose important information. And so, by having a free-thinking thought process that generates random memories and imaginative experiences you can to give you new ideas and insights, “said Irving, who has a philosophical theory of emotion that shaped the study ‘s approach.
Irving worked with Alison Gopnik, a UC Berkeley developmental psychologist and philosophy scholar who is also a co-author of the study.
“Babies and toddlers’ minds seem to be constantly wading, so we wondered what activities might serve,” Gopnik said. “Our paper suggests that movement of mind is an advanced feature of the psychology of the quirk and explains something we all experience. “
In preparation for the study, 39 adults were taught the difference between four areas of thinking: activity-related, free movement, deliberate restraint, and automatic restraint.
Next, while wearing electrodes on their heads that measured brain activity, they sat at a computer screen and tapped the left or right arrow keys to match the left and right arrows. appear in random rows on the screen.
When they finished a series, they were asked to rate on a scale of one to seven – whether their thoughts during the activity related to the task, moving freely, were deliberately blocked. or automatically blocked.
One example of unrelated activity and free movement is that if a student, instead of studying for an upcoming exam, found himself wondering if she had received a good level of assignment, then she realized she hadn’t prepared dinner yet, then asked if she should exercise more, and ended up remembering about her last vacation, Kam said.
The answers to the questions about thought processes were then divided into four groups and matched against recorded brain activity.
When study participants reported having thoughts that moved freely from topic to topic, they showed increased alpha wave activity in the frontal cortex of the brain, a pattern linked to the generation of creative ideas. Researchers also found evidence of reduced P3 brain signals during thoughts outside of work.
“The ability to detect our thought patterns through brain activity is an important step towards potential strategies for controlling how our thoughts expand over time, a strategy that useful for both healthy and disordered minds, “said Kam.
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In addition to Kam, Knight, Irving and Gopnik, co-authors of the study are Shawn Patel at UC Berkeley and Caitlin Mills at the University of Hampshire.
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