The Oxford Handbook of Spontaneous Thought. Mind-Wandering, Creativity, and Dreaming

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

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; the nighttime visions we call dreams; and clinical phenomena such as repetitive depressive rumination.

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.

Author Information

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.