Our minds may be directed toward the task at hand-they may be “here” as we concentrate on our daily commute or focus on the contents of a meeting or conversation. The magic of our minds is often lost in the mundane details of our daily routines, but the remarkable flexibility of our mental lives remains. Like a prop in an illusionist's sleight of hand, they seem to flit from place to place-now here, now there, now …nowhere. Seven experiments suggest that when the mind seems to disappear, there are times when we have simply failed to monitor its whereabouts-and there are times when it is actually gone. In the present research, we outline the properties of mind-blanking, differentiating this mental state from other mental states in terms of phenomenological experience, behavioral outcomes, and underlying cognitive processes. This mental state-mind-blanking-may represent an extreme decoupling of perception and attention, one in which attention fails to bring any stimuli into conscious awareness. At other times, however, people's minds may seem to go nowhere at all-they simply disappear. Many times, people's minds seem to go “somewhere else”-attention becomes disconnected from perception, and people's minds wander to times and places removed from the current environment (e.g., Schooler et al., 2004). Far from an exotic experience, this phenomenon seems to be a ubiquitous facet of human life (e.g., Killingsworth and Gilbert, 2010).
People often feel like their minds and their bodies are in different places. Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.
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