What happens when your mind goes blank, when the mind truly goes silent?

Most of the time when we are awake, our thoughts seem to flow like an endless river. We experience inner speech, mental images, silent feelings, and sensory awareness. 

Traditionally, it was thought that our inner experience always has some content, such as remembering a past event or imagining a future one. Based on this, researchers have long studied how attention drifts from the present task to unrelated thoughts, a phenomenon known as mind wandering. 

But recent discoveries suggest that sometimes, the mind might not wander to something else — it might actually go nowhere. These special moments are called mind blanking, a unique mental state where all thoughts disappear.

Scientists are now trying to map out what happens when you go completely blank - and how it differs from regular thought processes, meditation, and even sleep. 

Understanding mind blanking may challenge old views of consciousness ...

How the mind blanking unfolds
Researchers have studied mind blanking mainly through experiments where people perform attention-heavy tasks and are asked to report when their minds go completely blank. 

Participants either caught themselves in the moment or were prompted to reflect on their mental state. It turns out that mind blanking appears pretty often, though less often than mind wandering - about 5 to 20 percent of our awake time.

It has a unique pattern: people tend to feel sleepier, react more slowly, and make more mistakes just before reporting mind blanking compared to mind wandering or focused attention. 

Mind blanking seems to become more common during very long or tiring tasks or after intense physical activity. However, it also shows up during restful periods without any specific tasks, hinting that it might not just be about being tired. 

The way people report mind blanking also suggests it is quicker to notice than other types of thoughts, perhaps because realizing there is "nothing" takes less time than recognizing a specific idea in our inner sea of so many thoughts? 

Overall, mind blanking seems to be a distinct mental state that previous studies might have mixed with other types of thinking, leaving much of its nature still unexplored.

What happens in the brain during mind blanking?
Brain imaging studies using functional MR imaging (a brain scan that can measure which areas of the brain are active) and EEG (electroencephalography, which measures our brain waves) have revealed that mind blanking has its own neural signature. 

When people try hard to "empty their mind," the parts of the brain involved in inner speech and memory become less active, but still have measurable activity.  Yet, this may not fully represent spontaneous mind blanking, as active suppression of thoughts involves different brain circuits. 

Compared to mind wandering, mind blanking shows a pattern of widespread, diffuse communication between brain regions, possibly linked to lower alertness. In studies where people were simply asked to report their experiences without trying to influence them, mind blanking was likewise associated with widespread deactivation of the brain without extra effort-related activity. 

This suggests that spontaneous and deliberate mind blanking might be two different states.

Different ways of defining mind blanking
Mind blanking has been described in several ways across studies. Early definitions described it as a total lack of awareness, where a person was not conscious of any external or internal events. 

Later, researchers clarified that mind blanking differs from mind wandering because it does not involve thinking about something else—it involves not thinking at all. 

Some studies linked mind blanking to drowsiness or low arousal, while others focused on the absence of sensory, emotional, or verbal experiences. 

EEG studies have shown that mind blanking during attention tasks is marked by lower complexity of brain signals, similar to patterns seen in less conscious or sleep-like states. 

Mind blanking also shows increased slow brain waves and disrupted connections between brain regions, similar to what happens at the very start of falling asleep. 

Interestingly, even though people reporting mind blanking remain awake and responsive, their brain patterns resemble those seen in the early stages of sleep. Some scientists propose that mind blanking could be a kind of "local sleep," where parts of the brain temporarily shut down while the person remains outwardly awake.

How mind blanking relates to meditation and sleep
Contentless states are not unique to mind blanking. In meditation, many traditions describe reaching states where the mind has no active content. The practitioners remain aware without focusing on any particular object, thought, or sensation. 

Experienced meditators often describe increased mental clarity and a feeling of pure awareness without any specific content. The usual sense of time, agency, and self can also fade in these states. 

Surveys of meditators describe a dimension of "emptiness and non-egoic self-awareness," suggesting that deep meditation can lead to experiences somewhat similar to mind blanking but more structured and intentional.

Similarly, during sleep, some people report "white dreams" — dreams where no specific content is remembered, or even possibly where there was no real content to begin with. 

Scientists debate whether white dreams are forgotten rich dreams, poor-quality dreams, or true examples of contentless consciousness. These states may involve only a sense of being alive or a feeling of "now," without thoughts or images.

Although these contentless states from meditation and sleep share features with mind blanking, they are not identical. Meditation often involves sustained awareness and higher control, while sleep-related contentless states occur during lower levels of consciousness. 

Mind blanking during wakefulness seems to sit somewhere in between: the individual is awake and can respond, but reports no active mental content.

About the paper that inspired:

First Author: Thomas Andrillon, France
Published: Trends in Cognitive Sciences, April 2025
Link to paper: https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S1364-6613%2825%2900034-8