What Is Thought? Exploring the Neuroscience

Thoughts may be the most important content of our mental lives. Thoughts are unobservable and seemingly intangible, yet they determine what we do and therefore how our lives go. In this episode, I explore the neuroscience of human thinking.

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Timestamps:
00:00 What are thoughts?
03:20 The neuroscience of thought is young
04:00 Externally and Internally Generated Thought
06:45 The role of attention in thought
07:17 Spontaneous thought
09:35 External thought and the frontoparietal control system
11:20 Internal thought and the default mode network (DMN)
13:30 Social cognition and the DMN
17:10 Spatial working memory, vivid detailed thought, and the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC)
19:50 The context dependent nature of thought
22:15 The salience network as a switch between DMN and FPN
26:20 The potential role of hippocampal sharp wave ripples in spontaneous thought
28:46 Sensory systems in thought
29:35 Working memory in thinking (and corticostriatal memory gating)
32:14 Valuation, the anterior cingulate, orbitofrontal cortex, & ventral striatum
34:05 Language and human thinking
37:28 Feelings and other influences on thought
39:44 What do you think?

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Sources:

Smallwood, J., Turnbull, A., Wang, H. T., Ho, N. S., Poerio, G. L., Karapanagiotidis, T., ... & Jefferies, E. (2021). The neural correlates of ongoing conscious thought. Iscience, 24(3).

Kucyi, A., Kam, J. W., Andrews-Hanna, J. R., Christoff, K., & Whitfield-Gabrieli, S. (2023). Recent advances in the neuroscience of spontaneous and off-task thought: implications for mental health. Nature mental health, 1(11), 827-840.