Have you ever noticed that sometimes you don’t think about anything at all? Not that you forget, ponder or get distracted, but there simply comes a moment when consciousness seems to turn off. And this state has a scientific name: mind blanking.

Until recently, it was believed that the human brain is constantly creating thoughts while awake. However, new research shows that this is not so. Sometimes the stream of consciousness really stops and this is not a malfunction, but a special state of an awake brain, which is associated with a change in the level of arousal—in neuroscience, the degree of brain activity and sensitivity to external stimuli.

In the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, researchers from France and Belgium described experiments in which participants performed a simple task: responding to numbers appearing on the screen. At the same time, they were asked every minute: “What are you thinking about now?”

And the responses were divided into three categories: Focus on the task, mind wandering, and mind blanking.

Interestingly, participants pressed the button more slowly during the mind-blanking state than during the mind-wandering state. And this suggests a difference between the two states.

Electroencephalogram (EEG) has shown that during the mind blanking, the brain’s electrical activity slows down. However, it is difficult to identify the exact areas of the brain that are affected because EEG records waves through the skull and the signals are “blurred,” like a sound coming from behind a wall.

Further studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have provided a deeper understanding of this. They have shown that during the mind-blanking state, the brain exhibits global hypersynchronization, and all parts appear to work in harmony. This type of activity is more similar to that which occurs during deep sleep than while awake.

Understanding the states of "switching off" of consciousness may be key to studying the nature of consciousness itself and its mechanisms. As neuroscientist Thomas Andrillon notes, mind blanking is not a perception error, but a special form of being awake which differs in its mode of operation from the normal working mode of the brain.