Dataset Information

Mind wandering away from pain dynamically engages antinociceptive and default mode brain networks.

ABSTRACT: Human minds often wander away from their immediate sensory environment. It remains unknown whether such mind wandering is unsystematic or whether it lawfully relates to an individual's tendency to attend to salient stimuli such as pain and their associated brain structure/function. Studies of pain-cognition interactions typically examine explicit manipulation of attention rather than spontaneous mind wandering. Here we sought to better represent natural fluctuations in pain in daily life, so we assessed behavioral and neural aspects of spontaneous disengagement of attention from pain. We found that an individual's tendency to attend to pain related to the disruptive effect of pain on his or her cognitive task performance. Next, we linked behavioral findings to neural networks with strikingly convergent evidence from functional magnetic resonance imaging during pain coupled with thought probes of mind wandering, dynamic resting state activity fluctuations, and diffusion MRI. We found that (i) pain-induced default mode network (DMN) deactivations were attenuated during mind wandering away from pain; (ii) functional connectivity fluctuations between the DMN and periaqueductal gray (PAG) dynamically tracked spontaneous attention away from pain; and (iii) across individuals, stronger PAG-DMN structural connectivity and more dynamic resting state PAG-DMN functional connectivity were associated with the tendency to mind wander away from pain. These data demonstrate that individual tendencies to mind wander away from pain, in the absence of explicit manipulation, are subserved by functional and structural connectivity within and between default mode and antinociceptive descending modulation networks.

SUBMITTER: Kucyi A

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3832014 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Mind wandering away from pain dynamically engages antinociceptive and default mode brain networks.

Kucyi Aaron A Salomons Tim V TV Davis Karen D KD

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20131028 46

Human minds often wander away from their immediate sensory environment. It remains unknown whether such mind wandering is unsystematic or whether it lawfully relates to an individual's tendency to attend to salient stimuli such as pain and their associated brain structure/function. Studies of pain-cognition interactions typically examine explicit manipulation of attention rather than spontaneous mind wandering. Here we sought to better represent natural fluctuations in pain in daily life, so we ...[more]

PMID: 24167282

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Project description:A significant body of literature supports the contention that pupil size varies depending on cognitive load, affective state, and level of drowsiness. Here we assessed whether oculometric measures such as gaze position, blink frequency and pupil size were correlated with the occurrence and time course of self-reported mind-wandering episodes. We recorded the pupil size of two subjects engaged in a monotonous breath counting task while keeping their eyes on a fixation cross. This task is conducive to producing mind-wandering episodes. Each subject performed ten 20-min sessions, for total duration of about 4 h. Subjects were instructed to report spontaneous mind-wandering episodes by pressing a button when they lost count of their breath. After each button press, subjects filled in a short questionnaire describing the characteristics of their mind-wandering episode. We observed larger pupil size during the breath-focusing period compared to the mind-wandering period (p < 0.01 for both subjects). Our findings contradict previous research showing a higher baseline pupil size during mind wandering episodes in visual tasks. We discuss possible explanations for this discrepancy. We also analyzed nine other oculometric measures including blink rate, blink duration and gaze position. We built a support vector machine (SVM) classifier and showed that mean pupil size was the most reliable predictor of mind wandering in both subjects. The classification accuracy of mind wandering data segments vs. breath-focusing data segments was 81% for the first subject and 77% for the second subject. Additionally, we analyzed oculometric measures in light of the phenomenological data collected in the questionnaires. We showed that how well subjects remembered their thoughts while mind wandering was positively correlated with pupil size (subject 1, p < 0.001; subject 2, p < 0.05). Feelings of well being were also positively correlated with pupil size (subject 1, p < 0.001; subject 2, p < 0.001). Our results suggest that oculometric data could be used as a neurocognitive marker of mind-wandering episodes.

Dataset Information

Mind wandering away from pain dynamically engages antinociceptive and default mode brain networks.

Publications

Mind wandering away from pain dynamically engages antinociceptive and default mode brain networks.

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