The Oxford Handbook of Spontaneous Thought

Where do spontaneous thoughts come from? It may be surprising that the seemingly straightforward answers "from the mind" or "from the brain" are in fact an incredibly recent understanding of the origins of spontaneous thought. For nearly all of human history, our thoughts - especially the most sudden, insightful, and important - were almost universally ascribed to divine or other external sources. Only in the past few centuries have we truly taken responsibility for their own mental content, and finally localized thought to the central nervous system - laying the foundations for a protoscience of spontaneous thought. But enormous questions still loom: what, exactly, is spontaneous thought? Why does our brain engage in spontaneous forms of thinking, and when is this most likely to occur? And perhaps the question most interesting and accessible from a scientific perspective: how does the brain generate and evaluate its own spontaneous creations? Spontaneous thought includes our daytime fantasies and mind-wandering; the flashes of insight and inspiration familiar to the artist, scientist, and inventor; and the nighttime visions we call dreams. This Handbook brings together views from neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, phenomenology, history, education, contemplative traditions, and clinical practice to begin to address the ubiquitous but poorly understood mental phenomena that we collectively call 'spontaneous thought.' In studying such an abstruse and seemingly impractical subject, we should remember that our capacity for spontaneity, originality, and creativity defines us as a species - and as individuals. Spontaneous forms of thought enable us to transcend not only the here and now of perceptual experience, but also the bonds of our deliberately-controlled and goal-directed cognition; they allow the space for us to be other than who we are, and for our minds to think beyond the limitations of our current viewpoints and beliefs.

Auteur

Kieran C.R. Fox studied neuroscience, philosophy, and world religions during his undergraduate degree at McGill University. He used functional neuroimaging to study the cognitive neuroscience of meditation and spontaneous thought during his Masters and PhD at the University of British Columbia, working with Dr. Kalina Christoff. Currently, he is using intracranial electroencephalography to pursue these lines of research in the Department of Neurology at Stanford University, working with Dr. Josef Parvizi. Kalina Christoff is a Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Her work focuses on understanding human thought, using a combination of functional neuroimaging (fMRI), behavioral testing, and theoretical work.

Contenu

About the Editors Contributors Part I: Introduction and Overview 1. Introduction: Toward an Interdisciplinary Science of Spontaneous Thought Kieran C. R. Fox and Kalina Christoff Part II: Theoretical Perspectives 2. Why the Mind Wanders: How Spontaneous Thought's Default Variability May Support Episodic Efficiency and Semantic Optimization Caitlin Mills, Arianne Herrera-Bennett, Myrthe Faber, and Kalina Christoff 3. An Exploration/Exploitation Tradeoff Between Mind-Wandering and Goal-Directed Thinking Chandra S. Sripada 4. When the Absence of Reasoning Breeds Meaning: Metacognitive Appraisals of Spontaneous Thought Carey K. Morewedge and Daniella M. Kupor 5. The Mind Wanders with Ease: Low Motivational Intensity is an Essential Quality of Mind-Wandering Dylan Stan and Kalina Christoff 6. How does the brain's spontaneous activity generate our thoughts? The spatiotemporal theory of task-unrelated thought (STTT) Georg Northoff 7. Investigating the elements of thought: Towards a component process account of spontaneous Cognition Jonathan Smallwood, Daniel Margulies, Boris C. Bernhardt, and Elizabeth Jeffries Part III: Philosophical, Evolutionary, and Historical Perspectives 8. The Philosophy of Mind-Wandering Zachary C. Irving and Evan Thompson 9. Why is mind wandering interesting for philosophers? Thomas Metzinger 10. Spontaneity in Evolution, Learning, Creativity, and Free Will: Spontaneous Variation in Four Selectionist Phenomena Dean Keith Simonton 11. How Does the Waking and Sleeping Brain Produce Spontaneous Thought and Imagery, and Why? John S. Antrobus 12. Spontaneous Thinking in Creative Lives: Building Connections Between Science and History Alex Soojung-Kim Pang Part IV: Mind-Wandering and Daydreaming 13. Functional neuroanatomy of spontaneous thought Jessica R. Andrews-Hanna, Zachary C. Irving, Kieran C. R. Fox, R. Nathan Spreng, and Kalina Christoff 14. Neural Origins of Self-Generated Cognition: Insights from Intracranial Electrical Stimulation and Recordings in Humans Kieran C. R. Fox 15. Mind-wandering and self-referential thought Arnaud D'Argembeau 16. Phenomenological Properites of Mind-Wandering and Daydreaming: A Historical Overview and Functional Correlates David Stawarczyk 17. Spontaneous thought and goal pursuit: From functions such as planning to dysfunctions such as rumination Eric Klinger, Ernst H. W. Koster, and Igor Marchetti 18. Unraveling What's On Our Minds: How Different Types of Mind-Wandering Affect Cognition and Behavior Claire M. Zedelius and Jonathan W. Schooler 19. Mind-wandering and events in the external world: Electrophysiological evidence for attentional Decoupling Julia W. Y. Kam and Todd C. Handy 20. Mind-wandering in educational settings Jeffrey D. Wammes, Paul Seli, and Daniel Smilek Part V: Creativity and Insight 21. Interacting Brain Networks Underlying Creative Cognition and Artistic Performance Roger E. Beaty and Rex E. Jung 22. Spontaneous and controlled processes in creative cognition Mathias Benedek and Emanuel Jauk 23. Wandering and Direction in Creative Production Charles Dobson 24. Flow as spontaneous thought: Insight and implicit learning John Vervaeke, Leo Ferraro, and Arianne Herrera-Bennett 25. Internal Orientation in Aesthetic Experience Oshin Vartanian 26. Neuropsychopharmacology of Flexible and Creative Thinking David Q. Beversdorf Part VI: Sleep, Dreaming, and Memory 27. Dreaming is an intensified form of mind-wandering, based in augmented portions of the default network G. William Domhoff 28. Neural Correlates of Self-Generated Imagery and Cognition Throughout the Sleep Cycle Kieran C. R. Fox and Manesh Girn 29. Spontaneous thought, insight, and control in lucid dreams Jennifer M. Windt and Ursula Voss 30. Microdream neurophenomenology: A paradigm for dream neuroscience Tore A. Nielsen 31. Sleep paralysis: Phenomenology, Neurophysiology, and Treatment Elizaveta Solomonova 32. Dreaming and Waking Thought as a Reflection of Memory Consolidation Erin J. Wamsley 33. Involuntary Autobiographical Memories: Spontaneous Recollections of the Past John H. Mace Part VII: Clinical Contexts, Contemplative Traditions, and Altered States of Consciousness 34. Potential Clinical Benefits and Risks of Spontaneous Thought: Unconstrained Attention as a Way Into and a Way Out of Psychological Disharmony Dylan Stan and Kalina Christoff 35. Candidate Mechanisms of Spontaneous Cognition as Revealed By Dementia Syndromes Claire O'Callaghan and Muireann Irish 36. Rumination is a Sticky Form of Spontaneous Thought Elizabeth DuPre and R. Nathan Spreng 37. Pain and Spontaneous Thought Aaron Kucyi 38. Spontaneous thought in contemplative traditions Halvor Eifring 39. Catching the Wandering Mind: Meditation as a Window into Spontaneous Thought Wendy Hasenkamp 40. Spontaneous Mental Experiences in Extreme and Unusual Environments Peter Suedfeld, A. Dennis Rank, and Marek Malus 41. Cultural neurophenomenology of psychedelic thought: Guiding the "unconstrained" mind through ritual and context Michael Lifshitz, Eli Sheiner, and Laurence Kirmayer