Here’s What Happens to Your Brain When Your Mind Goes Blank

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YesDo you know when someone pulls away for a second and you can’t get their attention? “What are you thinking about?” ” elicits a response of “Nothing,” which you think is a euphemism for private thoughts. Historically, consciousness was assumed to be continuous when you’re awake, flowing between a focus on external things and internal thoughts as your mind wanders. But a new PNAS study suggests that parts of our brains might actually nap during these thinking moments.

“Mind blanking is defined as the complete absence of mental content that can be described to others. No mental images, no catchy melody playing on repeat in your head, no obsessive thoughts… nothing!” explained the author of the study and neurologist from Sorbonne University, Esteban Munoz-Musat, in a press release.

Finding that mind suppression was associated with some psychiatric disorders, including anxiety disorders and possibly ADHD, Munoz-Musat and colleagues at the Sorbonne and Monash University in Australia sought to determine whether this reflected detectable changes in the brain. They used high-density EEGs to record the brain activity of 62 healthy volunteers as they completed a tedious task in a dimly lit room for an hour and 40 minutes. The volunteers were interrupted at random intervals and asked to report their mental state: thinking about the task, thinking about something else, or thinking about nothing at all, i.e., clearing the mind.

Read more: “Why did this occur to you? »

The results showed that the mind blanking episodes described by the participants corresponded to detectable changes in their neurophysiology. Information sharing between more distant parts of the cerebral cortex was disrupted. Neural representations of external stimuli, such as images and sounds, were significantly reduced. Some of the typical signals of conscious access to information have been suspended.

“These observations suggest that during an episode of mind suppression, participants had reduced access to sensory information from their environment,” Thomas Andrillon, a neurocognition researcher at Sorbonne University, lead author of the study, said in a statement.

Basically, being awake doesn’t guarantee you’re thinking about anything. You may experience intervals where parts of the brain take a nap, which researchers call “neuronal silence.”

Mind suppression is common, varying between individuals from as little as five percent of our waking hours to as much as 20 percent. The study authors wrote that “although puzzling, this [content-free] perspective would bring even more value to these precious moments of conscious experience.

In other words, make the most of your alert waking moments.

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Main image: fran_kie / Shutterstock

• Devin Reese

  Published on January 2, 2026

  Devin Reese is the editor-in-chief of Natural history and a science writer based in Alexandria, Virginia.