We have all experienced it, although many of us are unaware of it happening. It is the few moments when our mind goes blank. At that moment, we are not consciously thinking of anything. You might be looking at a book or your phone and be unaware of what you are doing. In company, you might suddenly hear your companion remark, “You seemed to be miles away.”
This is not daydreaming or a lapse in memory. It is also not you falling asleep for a few seconds. Researchers have now categorised this as a separate state of consciousness. They have termed this state as Mind Blanking. They believe it comes about due to a change in our arousal activity, in other words, how we react to various stimuli.
Here is a surprising piece of information that has surfaced from this research, and that is that most of us experience these mind blanking moments for between 5% to 20% of our waking hours. If this is so, then there must be some reason for the mind to take this action. And, we think there is.
Using volunteers to undergo electrooculography or EEG for short, and functional MRIs or fMRIs, they discovered these short blank periods were close to what the mind shows when it is in deep sleep. Deep sleep is one of the stages of the sleep cycle we go through every 90 minutes or so during our sleep. The function of deep sleep is to clean up the mind, control its temperature and conserve energy.
Although this research is still ongoing, the possibility arises that our mind is regularly taking a few moments to “turn us off” while it adjusts our mind settings to keep them functioning normally. If correct, it is just another amazing thing our mind does when we are completely unaware of what it is doing to protect us.
John Pullen 