Philosophers have long been fascinated by the stream of consciousness – thoughts, images, and bits of inner speech that dance across the inner stage. Yet for centuries, such ‘mind‐wandering' was deemed private and thus resistant to empirical investigation. Recent developments in psychology and neuroscience have reinvigorated scientific interest in the stream of thought. Despite this flurry of progress, scientists have stressed that mind‐wandering research requires firmer philosophical foundations. The time is therefore ripe for the philosophy of mind‐wandering. Our review begins (...) with a foundational question: What is mind‐wandering? We then investigate the significance of mind‐wandering for general philosophical topics, namely, mental action, introspection, and the norms of thinking and attention. (shrink)

For a large proportion of our daily lives, spontaneously occurring thoughts tend to disengage our minds from goal-directed thinking. Previous studies showed that EEG features such as the P3 and alpha oscillations can predict mind-wandering to some extent, but only with accuracies of around 60%. A potential candidate for improving prediction accuracy is the Steady-State Visual Evoked Potential, which is used frequently in single-trial contexts such as brain-computer interfaces as a marker of the direction of attention. In this study, we (...) modified the sustained attention to response task that is usually employed to measure spontaneous thought to incorporate the SSVEP elicited by a 12.5-Hz flicker. We then examined whether the SSVEP could track and allow for the prediction of the stickiness and task-relatedness dimensions of spontaneous thought. Our results show that the SSVEP evoked by flickering words was able to distinguish between more and less sticky thinking but not between whether a participant was on- or off-task. This suggests that the SSVEP is able to track spontaneous thinking when it is strongly disengaged from the task but not off-task thought in general. Future research should determine the exact dimensions of spontaneous thought to which the SSVEP is most sensitive. (shrink)