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BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article

Front. Hum. Neurosci.
Sec. Cognitive Neuroscience
Volume 19 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2025.1515902
This article is part of the Research Topic Unlocking Brain-Behavior Dynamics: Next-Generation Approaches and Methods View all 3 articles

Resting-State BOLD Temporal Variability of the Default Mode Network Predicts Spontaneous Mind Wandering, which is Negatively Associated with Mindfulness Skills

Provisionally accepted
Sara Sorella Sara Sorella 1*Cristiano Crescentini Cristiano Crescentini 1Alessio Matiz Alessio Matiz 1,2Minah Chang Minah Chang 3Alessandro Grecucci Alessandro Grecucci 3,4
  • 1 Department of Languages and Literatures, Communication, Education and Society, University of Udine, Udine, Friuli Venezia Giulia, Italy
  • 2 Department of Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Sicily, Italy
  • 3 Department of Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, University of Trento, Rovereto (TN), Italy
  • 4 Centre for Medical Sciences, University of Trento, Italy, Trento, Italy

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Mind wandering (MW) encompasses both a deliberate and a spontaneous disengagement of attention from the immediate external environment to unrelated internal thoughts. Importantly, MW has been suggested to have an inverse relationship with mindfulness, a state of nonjudgmental awareness of present-moment experience. Although they are respectively associated with increased and decreased activity in the default mode network (DMN), the specific contributions of deliberate and spontaneous MW, and their relationships with mindfulness abilities and resting-state macro networks remain to be elucidated. Therefore, resting-state MRI scans from 76 participants were analyzed with group independent component analysis to decompose brain networks into independent macro-networks and to see which of them predicted specific aspects of spontaneous and deliberate MW or mindfulness traits. Our results show that temporal variability of the resting-state DMN predicts spontaneous MW, which in turn is negatively associated with the acting with awareness facet of mindfulness. This finding shows that the DMN is not directly associated with overall mindfulness, but rather demonstrates that there exists a close relationship between DMN and MW, and furthermore, that the involvement of mindfulness abilities in this dynamic may be secondary. In sum, our study contributes to a better understanding of the neural bases of spontaneous MW and its relationship with mindfulness. These results open up the possibility of intervening on specific aspects of our cognitive abilities: for example, our data suggest that training the mindfulness facet acting with awareness would allow lessening our tendency for MW at inopportune times.

    Keywords: mind wandering, mindfulness, Temporal variability, Default Mode Network, Spontaneous mind wandering, Deliberate mind wandering

    Received: 23 Oct 2024; Accepted: 07 Jan 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Sorella, Crescentini, Matiz, Chang and Grecucci. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Sara Sorella, Department of Languages and Literatures, Communication, Education and Society, University of Udine, Udine, 33100, Friuli Venezia Giulia, Italy

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