New study suggests what actually happens when your mind goes blank

You know when your mind is just suddenly wiped clean and you have no idea where your thoughts have gone? Well, there’s a new study that can tell you what’s going on when this happens and it's pretty weird.

“My mind has gone blank” is a phrase you’ve probably heard of, and you might have even said a good few times yourself.

It’s just something that happens to all of us at one time or another, and nobody knows why.

But it turns out the science behind it is surprising, as a new study has shed some light on what could be going on in the brain.

As it turns out, some of us experience this 'mind blank' phenomenon more than others and some experience it in a totally different way - which is crazy to only just find out.

The lead study author called Athena Demertzi revealed that the aim of the study was to ‘better understand mind blanking'.

The team did this by 'parsing through 80 relevant research articles – including some of our own in which we recorded participants' brain activity when they were reporting that they were “thinking of nothing”.’

Researchers found out what happens to your brain when your mind blanks (DMP / Getty)

Demertzi and colleagues in France, Australia, and Belgium wanted to find out the nature of what consciousness is, and this deep dive into it could hold the answers.

After analyzing the research articles, the researchers went on to find that on average, a person will ‘blank’ around five to 20 percent of the time and that people will experience this in a different way.

For example, they could go on to blank more often if they have a neuro-developmental disorder such as ADHD.

Or they could experience ‘blanking’ and their mind ‘wandering’, which have separate feelings.

You can blank when you are experiencing sustained focus, or when you are deprived of sleep or carrying out an intense workout.

Or, it could be down to neurological and psychiatric conditions, such as anxiety, Kleine-Levin syndrome, or a traumatic brain injury (TBI).

So, what is happening in the brain when it 'blanks'?

Behavioral studies and research using brain imaging shows that when a person is blanking, the brain is far from being lazy as electroencephalography (EEG) found that the mind goes into a ‘local sleep’ state where sleep-like waves and reduced signal complexity, a slower heart rate and decreased pupil size occur.

Researchers found that we enter a sleep state (10'000 Hours / Getty)

All of these things typically indicate that sleep has begun.

Then, when looking into a 2019 study which was aided by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), it was found that several brain functions were switched off when people deliberately tried to turn their minds off.

This includes the inferior frontal gyrus, Broca’s area, supplementary motor cortex, and the hippocampus.

But Demertzi and the researchers shared that because they chose to make their minds blank, the results could be different if it was to happen spontaneously.

“We realize that the investigation of [mind blanks] presents methodological and conceptual challenges,” the team noted.

On a whole they think it happens when the brain is in a high or low arousal state and are hoping the study will spark more conversations about the mind.

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