Angelica Kaufmann is a researcher in philosophy at the University of Milan. Her work focuses on philosophy of mind, animal cognition, and cognitive science, with particular interests in temporal cognition, consciousness, mental representation, and social cognition in humans and other animals. She uses philosophical and interdisciplinary approaches to investigate how different kinds of minds experience, navigate, and make sense of the world.
A post by Angelica Kaufmann
“Our heart-beats, our breathing, the pulses of our attention, fragments of words or sentences that pass through our imagination, are what people this dim habitat. … In short, empty our minds as we may, some form of changing process remains for us to feel, and cannot be expelled.”
— William James, The Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, Ch. XV, “The Perception of Time,” section “We have no sense for empty time”
Mental life is not always equally full or equally structured. Sometimes thought is busy, vivid, and difficult to interrupt. A useful example is intrusive mental imagery. In conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety disorders, and obsessive-compulsive disorder, intrusive images can be especially vivid, affectively charged, and hard to regulate (Brewin et al., 2010). They show one way in which some conscious experience can become highly salient and difficult to step back from.
But some conscious mental life can also seem to vary in the opposite direction. Sometimes, instead of becoming overly full, it appears to lose structure altogether. Many people recognise the experience: you are reading a page, listening to someone speak, or waiting at a traffic light, and then suddenly realise that your mind seems to have gone blank. Not wandering somewhere else. Not replaying a memory. Not imagining tomorrow’s lunch. Just — nothing.
Or at least, that is how it seems.
Cognitive scientists and philosophers call this phenomenon mind blanking (James, 1980). The standard reports are familiar: “I was thinking of nothing,” “my mind went away,” “there was nothing in my head”. But once we look more closely, things become less straightforward. Does mind blanking involve a real interruption of conscious experience? Is it a failure of attention? A failure of access? A failure of report? Or is it a family of different states that all get compressed into the same ordinary description: my mind went blank?
One reason the phenomenon is interesting is that a report of “nothing” does not by itself settle what was happening in the episode itself. A lack of reportable content is not obviously the same as a lack of conscious content (Kaufmann et al., 2024). That distinction raises more than one possibility. Some cases of mind blanking may indeed involve a genuine lapse or interruption. But others may involve forms of consciousness that are present, yet too thin, too unstable, or too poorly structured to be recoverable afterwards.
This is one reason the topic is philosophically important. It pushes against a familiar assumption: that if a subject cannot report any content, there must have been no content there to begin with. That inference may be too quick. Sometimes what is missing may be structure, stability, or reportability, rather than consciousness itself.
But that cannot be the whole story.
Part of the difficulty is methodological. Most studies identify mind blanking through self-report, often using experience-sampling or probe-caught methods (Ward & Wegner, 2013; Kawagoe et al., 2019). Participants are interrupted during a task and asked what was on their mind just before the probe. If they say “nothing,” we classify the episode as mind blanking. Yet a report of “nothing” is already a retrospective judgement. It tells us how the subject later characterises the episode; it does not straightforwardly reveal what the first-order state itself was like. As Fell (2022) notes, this is part of what makes the phenomenon conceptually slippery.
Recent empirical work suggests that there may be more than one mechanism behind mind blanking. EEG studies show that some instances seem connected to low arousal, slow-wave-like activity during wakefulness, and patterns associated with local-sleep intrusions (Andrillon et al., 2019, 2021; Muñoz-Musat et al., 2025). In those cases, blankness may reflect a genuine reduction in the normal richness of waking thought. Other cases, however, seem to involve something different. With their fMRI work, Kawagoe and colleagues have shown that at least some forms of mind blanking may involve a disruption in access or reportability rather than a total disappearance of ongoing mentality (Kawagoe et al., 2018, 2019). Their work suggests that temporary deactivation of systems involved in inner speech may leave subjects with little verbally articulable grip on what is happening.
That already points to a useful conclusion: mind blanking is probably not a single transparent state. It is more plausible to think of it as a heterogeneous phenomenon. Some episodes may be low-arousal lapses; others may involve failure of conceptual access; still others may involve disruption of inner speech or of the mechanisms that support report. That would help explain why the same surface description — “there was nothing in my mind” — can cover rather different kinds of episode.
Mind blanking is often discussed alongside mind wandering, and the contrast is important. Mind wandering is usually understood as spontaneous thought unrelated to the task at hand: daydreams, worries, plans, memories, images, bits of inner speech. It is typically contentful, even when fragmented (Smallwood & Schooler, 2015; Christoff et al., 2016). Mind blanking, by contrast, is marked by the reported absence of such content. That suggests that blanking is not simply “mind wandering with less content.” It may instead mark a different region of mental life altogether — one that sits near the lower boundary of what can be reported.
This is where the topic becomes especially interesting for the study of imagination. Imagination is usually associated with richness: images, scenarios, fantasies, simulations, counterfactuals. Mind blanking seems to sit at the opposite edge.
As work on aphantasia shows, however, reduced or absent imagery can reveal something important about the structure of imagination itself (Zeman et al., 2015; Pearson, 2019). Mind blanking invites a similar move: what happens when conscious life becomes so thin, so unstable, or so inaccessible that it is later reported as empty.
This is one reason it helps to compare mind blanking with other states that are also described as empty.
A first comparison case is the Ganzfeld. In classic Ganzfeld settings, subjects are exposed to a highly uniform sensory field — diffuse light, white noise, or otherwise unpatterned stimulation. The result is not ordinary perception, but not simple nothingness either. The experiential field can begin to feel strangely homogeneous, unarticulated, or almost empty, even while experience persists (Avant, 1965; Wackermann et al., 2008).
The Ganzfeld shows that consciousness can feel blank without disappearing. What is reduced is not experience as such, but differentiation within experience. The perceptual field becomes so uniform that subjects may describe it as empty or fading. This does not make Ganzfeld experience identical to mind blanking, but it provides a useful model of blankness as low structure rather than literal nothingness.
A second comparison case comes from the literature on white dreams. White dreams are reports in which a subject, on waking, says that when sleeping, they were dreaming, but cannot recall any specific content. They do not report a vivid scene, narrative, or recognisable image. Instead, they report something like: I know I was dreaming, but I cannot say what it was about (Fazekas et al., 2019).
White dreams are interesting because they seem to occupy an intermediate space between vivid dream experience and total absence. They are not straightforward cases of no experience, but neither are they ordinary dreams that are simply forgotten. Fazekas and colleagues argue that white dreams may instead reflect a low-vividness or low-specificity form of consciousness, one with too little determinacy to support detailed report. Related work on dreaming has also connected dream reports to activity in posterior cortical regions associated with perceptual experience, which suggests that the boundary between full-blown experience and near-blankness may be more graded than we often assume (Siclari et al., 2017).
Seen in this wider frame, mind blanking becomes less puzzling and more intriguing. It may be tempting to think that there are only two possibilities: either consciousness is present with content, or consciousness is absent. But cases such as Ganzfeld experience and white dreams suggest a more articulated picture. Consciousness may sometimes persist in ways that are weakly structured, low in vividness, or minimally differentiated.
This brings us back to intrusive mental imagery. Intrusive images and mind blanking may be useful as contrasting cases. In one, conscious content is unusually vivid, salient, and difficult to disengage from. In the other, conscious life is reported as sparse or even empty. The contrast should not be overstated, but it helps show that mental life varies not only in content, but also in vividness, salience, structure, and reportability. Thinking about both ends of this range may help us better understand what kinds of regulation, access, and reflective grasp conscious episodes allow.
Mind blanking is interesting for more than one reason. For philosophy, getting to know this phenomenon better presses on the distinction between absence of content, absence of report, and absence of consciousness. For cognitive science, it suggests that “nothing in mind” reports should not be treated as simple evidence for a single kind of state. And for the study of imagination, it raises an especially interesting question: how much structure does conscious life need to have before we count it as genuinely imagistic, representational, or even fully thinkable?
Sometimes the mind goes wandering. Sometimes it becomes vivid in ways that are difficult to regulate. And sometimes, perhaps, it goes almost nowhere at all.
That is why mind blanking deserves more attention than it has so far received. It is not simply a curiosity about lapses. It is a window into the lower boundary of reportable experience — the point at which consciousness becomes thin enough to look like nothing at all, and that may not be bad at all.
References
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