Wandering minds: the default network and stimulus-independent thought
Malia Mason and five colleagues combine thought sampling with brain imaging to ask what supports the mind's tendency to wander. They report that mind-wandering is associated with activity in a default network of cortical regions that are active when the brain is at rest. Individuals' reports of how readily their minds wander were also correlated with activity in this network. The abstract is short and does not describe the sample or task. This page cites the paper as the first test that tied the network to reported stimulus-independent thought.
Malia Mason and five colleagues combine thought sampling with brain imaging to ask what supports the mind's tendency to wander. They report that mind-wandering is associated with activity in a default network of cortical regions that are active when the brain is at rest. Individuals' reports of how readily their minds wander were also correlated with activity in this network. The abstract is short and does not describe the sample or task. This page cites the paper as the first test that tied the network to reported stimulus-independent thought.
Written from the abstract on Crossref, read 2026-10-23.
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Mason, M. F., Norton, M. I., Van Horn, J. D., Wegner, D. M., Grafton, S. T., & Macrae, C. N. (2007). Wandering minds: the default network and stimulus-independent thought. Science, 315(5810), 393-395. doi:10.1126/science.1131295