Christopher Honey
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences
Johns Hopkins University

Persistent Mental Content

Some thoughts and experiences persist in our minds on the scale of minutes or hours. For example, during a conversation, the earlier content of the discussion remains fresh in mind and it may even persist involuntarily into our thinking after the conversation is over. What cognitive and neural mechanisms underlie this persistent mental content? Moreover, how can this content — the thoughts that persist in mind spontaneously — be controlled, if at all? To investigate this question, we employ a paradigm for inducing persistent thoughts using immersive narrative stimuli. We then measure the rate and influence of the persistent thoughts and how these persistent thoughts are modulated by interfering stimuli. Our behavioral data point to the existence of “deep context” — a slowly-changing representation of situational content that is resistant to stimulus-driven interference and volitional control, and which continually biases our memory retrieval. Our fMRI data implicate the posterior medial cortex in sustaining persistent mental content. These data begin to shape an answer to a very old question: “what will enter my mind next, and why?”

A pizza lunch will be served.