The lights are on, but is anyone home? (Credit: Prostock-studio on Shutterstock)

Study Shows Your Eyes See, But Your Brain Doesn’t Process During Mental Absences In A Nutshell

Consciousness may actually pause while you’re awake. The brain patterns during mind blanking resemble markers seen in deep sleep or anesthesia (disrupted connectivity, impaired sensory processing) but occur as brief lapses during otherwise normal wakefulness.

It happens more than you might think. People experience complete mental blankness about 16% of the time during simple tasks, nearly half as often as mind wandering.

Your brain shows opposite patterns for each. Mind wandering makes people faster and more impulsive. Mind blanking slows responses and creates “absences” where people miss cues entirely, as if mentally checked out.

Visual information never reaches awareness. During mind blanking, your eyes still see, but brain scans show the visual information fails to trigger the later processing stages associated with conscious perception.

Ever zone out so completely that there’s just…nothing? No daydreams, no wandering thoughts, just mental emptiness. Scientists have a name for this phenomenon: mind blanking. Now, research suggests these moments aren’t just extreme daydreaming. They may be genuine pauses in consciousness itself.

Researchers at Sorbonne Université monitored the brain activity of 62 adults during a simple attention task. At random points (about every 40–70 seconds), participants reported what was happening in their mind just before the probe: focused on the task, mind wandering, mind blanking, or couldn’t remember. The results, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed mind blanking happened surprisingly often (about 16% of the time, compared to 35% for mind wandering).

What exactly makes mind blanking distinct? Each mental state produced different behavior patterns. Mind wandering made people respond faster but commit more false alarms, as if acting on impulse. Mind blanking did the opposite. People slowed down and missed more responses, as if they’d mentally checked out.

Your Brain Shows a Telltale Pattern During Mental Absences

The research team measured multiple aspects of brain function, from the complexity of neural signals to how different brain regions communicate. Mind blanking produced a clear front-versus-back dissociation: the front of the brain showed increased fast activity while the back, especially areas processing visual information, showed the opposite pattern. This split didn’t appear during mind wandering, suggesting the two states work through completely different mechanisms.

The picture gets more interesting when examining how distant brain regions communicate. Depending on the measure used, mind blanking showed contradictory patterns: one metric suggested increased synchronization between regions, while another revealed decreased information sharing, particularly between frontal and parietal areas linked to conscious awareness. The researchers suggest this may reflect a shift from meaningful information exchange to more rigid, synchronized activity. It’s similar to what can happen when episodes of neural silencing spread across the cortex.

Visual Information Never Reaches Awareness

When researchers analyzed how the brain responded to the visual stimuli participants were monitoring, they found something notable. During focused attention and mind wandering, visual information traveled through the brain normally, triggering responses around 200 milliseconds after each image appeared and continuing through later processing stages.

During mind blanking, this cascade simply didn’t happen. While early brain responses to visual stimuli looked broadly similar across all three states, the later responses associated with conscious perception were severely disrupted during mind blanking. Machine learning algorithms could reliably predict what stimulus participants had seen during focused attention and mind wandering, but failed completely during mind blanking. The visual information hit the eyes but never made it to conscious awareness.

Mind blanking. (Credit: Ana Yael.) Tracking Mental States from Brain Activity

The researchers trained machine learning algorithms on brain activity patterns labeled by participants’ self-reports. These classifiers could then predict mental states during unlabeled moments, or times when participants hadn’t been asked what they were experiencing. The system performed better than chance, and when applied to these unprobed moments, it recovered some of the expected behavior patterns, especially for mind blanking. This approach could eventually help scientists track consciousness dynamics that happen too quickly for people to notice or report.

Challenging What It Means to Be Awake

The findings challenge a basic assumption: that being awake means continuously experiencing something. The neural signatures of mind blanking, including disrupted information sharing between brain regions, impaired sensory processing, absent responses normally linked to conscious perception, echo some markers seen when consciousness fades during deep sleep or anesthesia. But these were brief lapses inside an otherwise awake, responsive state.

Mind blanking may represent genuine gaps in the stream of conscious experience, brief moments when the brain fails to generate or access conscious content. This fits with some theories suggesting consciousness isn’t continuous but occurs in discrete moments separated by contentless periods.

Not everyone experienced mind blanking equally. A small group of participants never reported it at all, though they did report mind wandering. Previous research has found higher rates of mind blanking in people with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, suggesting it might be trait-dependent.

The researchers acknowledge their findings face limitations. Self-reports can be unreliable, and sampling mental states every 40-70 seconds can’t capture everything happening in between. The study also couldn’t pinpoint exactly when mind blanking episodes began or ended. Still, the convergence of behavioral, experiential, and brain activity evidence points to mind blanking as something fundamentally different from mind wandering—a state where consciousness may genuinely pause even as wakefulness persists.

Disclaimer: This article discusses neuroscience research and is not medical advice. Concerns about attention or consciousness should be discussed with a healthcare provider.

Paper Notes Limitations

The validity and reliability of self-reports during experience sampling presents inherent challenges. Some participants never reported mind blanking, raising questions about whether the phenomenon is trait-dependent or reflects different reporting biases. The probe-catching method samples mental states approximately every 40-70 seconds, missing content between probes. The study considered trials as mind blanking if they occurred within five seconds before a probe, a criterion motivated by technical rather than theoretical considerations. Some neural correlates may not generalize beyond this specific task context.

Funding and Disclosures

The research received funding from the European Research Council ERC-StG SleepingAwake 101116748, Agence Nationale de la Recherche ANR-22-CE37-0006-01, and Human Frontiers Science Program LT000362/2018-L. The authors declared no competing interests. Andrew W. Corcoran acknowledges support from the Three Springs Foundation. Part of the work was carried out in the Centre de NeuroImagerie de Recherche of Institut du Cerveau.

Publication Details

Authors: Esteban Munoz-Musat, Arthur Le Coz, Andrew W. Corcoran, Laouen Belloli, Lionel Naccache, and Thomas Andrillon

Affiliations: Sorbonne Université, Institut du Cerveau-Paris Brain Institute (ICM, INSERM, CNRS, APHP), Hôpital de la Pitié Salpêtrière, Paris, France; Université Paris-Cité/Service de Neurologie Cognitive, Hôpital Lariboisière-Fernand Widal, Paris, France; Service des Pathologies du Sommeil, Hôpital Pitié Salpêtrière, Paris, France; Monash Centre for Consciousness and Contemplative Studies, Faculty of Arts, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia; Service de Neurophysiologie, Hôpital Pitié Salpêtrière, Paris, France

Journal: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) | Paper Title: “Behavioral, experiential, and physiological signatures of mind blanking” | Publication Date: December 23, 2025 | Volume/Issue: Vol. 122, No. 52, e2510262122 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2510262122 | Article Type: Open access article distributed under Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CC BY)