Sydney, April 25 -- A new study by Australian and European neuroscientists and philosophers revealed what happens in the brain when minds go blank, a common yet poorly understood mental state.
The team analyzed 80 studies and concluded that mind blanking is a distinct experience, separate from "mind wandering", and occurs in about 5 to 20 percent of the waking life, according to the researchers from Australia's Monash University, Belgium's University of Liege and France's Paris Brain Institute.
The study, published on Thursday in the Cell Press journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, defined mind blanking as the absence of reportable thoughts and it is often linked to sluggishness, drowsiness, or lapses in attention.
Mind blanking tends to...