The myth of cognitive agency: Subpersonal thinking as a cyclically recurring loss of mental autonomy

Frontiers in Psychology

Volumn 4, Issue DEC, 2013, Pages

  Metzinger, Thomas ^a,b  

^a JOHANNES GUTENBERG UNIVERSITY   (Germany)

^b FRANKFURT INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDIES   (Germany)

Author keywords

Cognitive phenomenology; Consciousness; Epistemic agency; Meditation; Mental autonomy; Mind wandering; Self consciousness; Subpersonal processes

Indexed keywords

EID: 84891681495     PISSN: None     EISSN: 16641078     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00931     Document Type: Article

References (146)

1. Andrews-Hanna, J. R., Reidler, J. S., Huang, C., and Buckner, R. L. (2010). Evidence for the default network's role in spontaneous cognition. J. Neurophysiol. 104, 322-335. doi: 10.1152/jn.00830.2009.
2. Baird, B., Smallwood, J., and Schooler, J. W. (2011). Back to the future: autobiographical planning and the functionality of mind-wandering. Conscious. Cogn. 20, 1604-1611. doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2011.08.007.
3. Bayne, T., and Montague, M. (eds.). (2011). Cognitive Phenomenology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199579938.001.0001.
4. Bennett, M. R., and Hacker, P. M. S. (2003). Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. Oxford: Blackwell.
5. Bermúdez, J. L. (2005). Philosophy of Psychology: A Contemporary Introduction. Routledge contemporary introductions to philosophy. New York, NY: Routledge.
6. Bickle, J. (2013). "Multiple realizability," in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (Spring 2013 Edition), ed Edward N. Zalta. Available online at: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2013/entries/multiple-realizability/.
7. Bigelsen, J., and Schupak, C. (2011). Compulsive fantasy: proposed evidence of an under-reported syndrome through a systematic study of 90 self-identified non-normative fantasizers. Conscious. Cogn. 20, 1634-1648. doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2011.08.013.
8. Blanke, O. (2012). Multisensory brain mechanisms of bodily self-consciousness. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 13, 556-571. doi: 10.1038/nrn3292.
9. Blanke, O., and Metzinger, T. (2009). Full-body illusions and minimal phenomenal selfhood. Trends Cogn. Sci. 13, 7-13. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2008.10.003.
10. Blanke, O., and Mohr, C. (2005). Out-of-body experience, heautoscopy, hallucination of neurological and autoscopic origin implications for neurocognitive mechanisms of corporeal awareness and self consciousness. Brain Res. Rev. 50, 184-199. doi: 10.1016/j.brainresrev.2005.05.008.
11. Brass, M., and Haggard, P. (2007). To do or not to do: the neural signature of self-control. J. Neurosci. 27, 9141-9145. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0924-07.2007.
12. Bressler, S. L., and Kelso, J. A. (2001). Cortical coordination dynamics and cognition. Trends Cogn. Sci. 5, 26-36. doi: 10.1016/S1364-6613(00)01564-3.
13. Brugger, P. (2002). Reflective mirrors: perspective-taking in autoscopic phenomena. Cogn. Neuropsychiatry 7, 179-194. doi: 10.1080/13546800244000076.
14. Brugger, P., Regard, M., and Landis, T. (1997). Illusory reduplication of one's own body: phenomenology and classification of autoscopic phenomena. Cogn. Neuropsychiatry 2, 19-38. doi: 10.1080/135468097396397.
15. Buckner, R. L., Andrews-Hanna, J. R., and Schacter, D. L. (2008). The brain's default network. Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1124, 1-38. doi: 10.1196/annals.1440.011.
16. Buckner, R. L., and Carroll, D. C. (2007). Self-projection and the brain. Trends Cogn. Sci. 11, 49-57. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2006.11.004.
17. Buss, S. (2008). "Personal autonomy," in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed E. N. Zalta (Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305: The Metaphysics Research Lab). Available online at: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/personal-autonomy/.
18. Campbell-Meiklejohn, D. K., Woolrich, M. W., Passingham, R. E., and Rogers, R. D. (2008). Knowing when to stop: the brain mechanisms of chasing losses. Biol. Psychiatry 63, 293-300. doi: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2007.05.014.
19. Chalmers, D. J. (2000). "What is a neural correlate of consciousness," in Neural Correlates of Consciousness: Empirical and Conceptual Questions, ed T. Metzinger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 17-39.
20. Chin, J., and Schooler, J. W. (2009). "Meta-awareness," in Encyclopedia of Consciousness, ed W. P. Banks (Amsterdam: Elsevier), 33-40. doi: 10.1016/B978-012373873-8.00051-7.
21. Christman, J. (2008). "Autonomy in moral and political philosophy," in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed E. N. Zalta (Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305: The Metaphysics Research Lab). Available online at: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/autonomy-moral/.
22. Christoff, K. (2012). Undirected thought: neural determinants and correlates. Brain Res. 1428, 51-59. doi: 10.1016/j.brainres.2011.09.060.
23. Christoff, K., Gordon, A. M., Smallwood, J., Smith, R., and Schooler, J. W. (2009). Experience sampling during fMRI reveals default network and executive system contributions to mind wandering. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 106, 8719-8724. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0900234106.
24. Churchland, P. M. (1989). A Neurocomputational Perspective: The Nature of Mind and the Structure of Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
25. Clark, A. (1989). Microcognition: Philosophy, Cognitive Science and Parallel Distributed Processing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
26. Clark, A. (2013). Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science. Behav. Brain Sci. 36, 181-204. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X12000477.
27. Cohen, A.-L. (2013). Attentional decoupling while pursuing intentions: a form of mind wandering? Front. Psychol. 4:693. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00693.
28. Colombo, M. (2012). Constitutive relevance and the personal/subpersonal distinction. Philos. Psychol. 26, 1-24. doi: 10.1080/09515089.2012.667623.
29. Corballis, M. C. (2013). Wandering tales: evolutionary origins of mental time travel and language. Front. Psychol. 4:485. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00485.
30. Damasio, A. R., and van Hoesen, G. W. (1983). Emotional disturbances associated with focal lesions of the limbic frontal lobe. Neuropsychol. Hum. Emot. 1, 85-110.
31. Davidson, D. (1980). "Mental events," in Readings in Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. 1, ed N. Block (London: Methuen), 107-119.
32. Dennett, D. C. (1969). Content and Consciousness. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
33. Dennett, D. C. (1987). The Intentional Stance. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
34. De Ridder, D., van Laere, K., Dupont, P., Menovsky, T., and Van de Heyning, P. (2007). Visualizing out-of-body experience in the brain. N. Engl. J. Med. 357, 1829-1833. doi: 10.1056/NEJMoa070010.
35. Drayson, Z. (2012). Thes uses and abuses of the personal/subpersonal distinction. Philos. Perspect. 26, 1-18. doi: 10.1111/phpe.12014.
36. Dresler, M., Wehrle, R., Spoormaker, V. I., Koch, S. P., Holsboer, F., Steiger, A., et al. (2012). Neural correlates of dream lucidity obtained from contrasting lucid versus non-lucid REM sleep: a combined EEG/fMRI case study. SLEEP 35, 1017-1020. doi: 10.5665/sleep.1974.
37. Dresler, M., Eibl, L., Fischer, C. F., Wehrle, R., Spoormaker, V. I., Steiger, A., et al. (2013). Volitional components of consciousness vary across wakefulness, dreaming and lucid dreaming. Front. Psychol. 4:987. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00987.
38. Filevich, E., Kühn, S., and Haggard, P. (2012). Intentional inhibition in human action: the power of 'no'. Neurosci. Biobehav. Rev. 36, 1107-1118. doi: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2012.01.006.
39. Filevich, E., Kühn, S., and Haggard, P. (2013). There is no free won't: antecedent brain activity predicts decisions to inhibit. PLoS ONE 8:e53053. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0053053.
40. Fosse, R., Stickgold, R., and Hobson, J. A. (2001). Brain-mind states: reciprocal variation in thoughts and hallucinations. Psychol. Sci. 12, 30-36. doi: 10.1111/1467-9280.00306.
41. Fox, K. C. R., Nijeboer, S., Solomonova, E., Domhoff, G. W., and Christoff, K. (2013). Dreaming as mind wandering: evidence from functional neuroimaging and first-person content reports. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 7:412. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00412.
42. Franklin, M. S., Mrazek, M. D., Broadway, J. M., and Schooler, J. W. (2013). Disentangling decoupling: comment on Smallwood (2013). Psychol. Bull. 139, 536-541. doi: 10.1037/a0030515.
43. Friston, K. (2010). The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory? Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 11, 127-138. doi: 10.1038/nrn2787.
44. Garrison, K. A., Santoyo, J. F., Davis, J. H., Thornhill, I. V., Thomas, A., Kerr, C. E., et al. (2013). Effortless awareness: using real time neurofeedback to investigate correlates of posterior cingulate cortex activity in meditators' self-report. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 7:440. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00440.
45. Gay, P., Schmidt, R. E., and Linden, M. (2011). Impulsivity and intrusive thoughts: related manifestations of self-control difficulties? Cognit. Ther. Res. 35, 293-303. doi: 10.1007/s10608-010-9317-z.
46. Green, C. E. (1994). Lucid dreaming: the paradox of consciousness during sleep. Hove: Psychology Press.
47. Gruberger, M., Ben-Simon, E., Levkovitz, Y., Zangen, A., and Hendler, T. (2011). Towards a neuroscience of mind-wandering. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 5:56. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2011.00056.
48. Hepler, J., and Albarracin, D. (2013). Complete unconscious control: using (in) action primes to demonstrate completely unconscious activation of inhibitory control mechanisms. Cognition 128, 271-279. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2013.04.012.
49. Hobson, J. A. (2002). Dreaming: An Introduction to the Science of Sleep. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
50. Hobson, J. A., Pace-Schott, E. F., and Stickgold, R. (2000). Dreaming and the brain: toward a cognitive neuroscience of conscious states. Behav. Brain Sci. 23, 793-842. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X00003976.
51. Hohwy, J. (2013). The Predictive Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
52. Hölzel, B. K., Lazar, S. W., Gard, T., Schuman-Olivier, Z., Vago, D. R., and Ott, U. (2011). How does mindfulness meditation work? Proposing mechanisms of action from a conceptual and neural perspective. Perspect. Psychol. Sci. 6, 537-559. doi: 10.1177/1745691611419671.
53. Hornsby, J. (2000). Personal and sub-personal: A defence of Dennett's early distinction. Philos. Explor. 3, 6-24. doi: 10.1080/13869790008520978.
54. Horovitz, S. G., Braun, A. R., Carr, W. S., Picchioni, D., Balkin, T. J., Fukunaga, M., et al. (2009). Decoupling of the brain's default mode network during deep sleep. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 106, 11376-11381. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0901435106.
55. Kane, M. J., Brown, L. H., McVay, J. C., Silvia, P. J., Myin-Germeys, I., and Kwapil, T. R. (2007). For whom the mind wanders, and when. An experience-sampling study of working memory and executive control in daily life. Psychol. Sci. 18, 614-621. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01948.x.
56. Killingsworth, M. A., and Gilbert, D. T. (2010). A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science 330, 932. doi: 10.1126/science.1192439.
57. Kim, J. (1993). Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. doi: 10.1017/CBO9780511625220.
58. Kim, J. (2005). Physicalism, or Something Near Enough. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
59. Kirsh, D. (2006). "Implicit and explicit representation," in Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, ed L. Nadel (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, Ltd.).
60. Klinger, E. (2013). Goal commitments and the content of thoughts and dreams: basic principles. Front. Psychol. 4:415. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00415.
61. Kühn, S., Haggard, P., and Brass, M. (2009). Intentional inhibition: how the "veto-area" exerts control. Hum. Brain Mapp. 30, 2834-2843. doi: 10.1002/hbm.20711.
62. Lenggenhager, B., Tadi, T., Metzinger, T., and Blanke, O. (2007). Video ergo sum: manipulating bodily self-consciousness. Science 317, 1096-1099. doi: 10.1126/science.1143439.
63. Limanowski, J., and Blankenburg, F. (2013). Minimal self-models and the free energy principle. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 7:547. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00547.
64. Lu, H., Zou, Q., Gu, H., Raichle, M. E., Stein, E. A., and Yang, Y. (2012). Rat brains also have a default mode network. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 109, 3979-3984. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1200506109.
65. Lukianowicz, N. (1958). Autoscopic phenomena. Arch. Neurol. Psychiatry 80, 199. doi: 10.1001/archneurpsyc.1958.02340080069019.
66. Madary, M. (2013). Anticipation and variation in visual content. Philos. Stud. 165, 335-347. doi: 10.1007/s11098-012-9926-3.
67. Mantini, D., and Vanduffel, W. (2012). Emerging roles of the brain's default network. Neuroscientist 19, 76-87. doi: 10.1177/1073858412446202.
68. Mason, M., Brown, K., Mar, R. A., and Smallwood, J. (2013). Driver of discontent or escape vehicle: the affective consequences of mindwandering. Front. Psychol. 4:477. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00477.
69. Mason, M. F., Norton, M. I., Van Horn, John, D., Wegner, D. M., Grafton, S. T., et al. (2007). Wandering minds: the default network and stimulus-independent thought. Science 315, 393-395. doi: 10.1126/science.1131295.
70. McCauley, R. N., and Bechtel, W. (2001). Explanatory pluralism and heuristic identity theory. Theory Psychol. 11, 736-760. doi: 10.1177/0959354301116002.
71. McDowell, J. (1994). The content of perceptual experience. Philos. Q. 44, 190-205. doi: 10.2307/2219740.
72. McVay, J. C., and Kane, M. J. (2009). Conducting the train of thought: working memory capacity, goal neglect, and mind wandering in an executive-control task. J. Exp. Psychol. Learn. Mem. Cogn. 35, 196. doi: 10.1037/a0014104.
73. McVay, J. C., and Kane, M. J. (2010). Does mind wandering reflect executive function or executive failure? Comment on Smallwood and Schooler (2006) and Watkins (2008). Psychol. Bull. 136, 188-197. doi: 10.1037/a0018298.
74. McVay, J. C., and Kane, M. J. (2013). Dispatching the wandering mind? Toward a laboratory method for cuing "spontaneous" off-task thought. Front. Psychol. 4:570. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00570.
75. Menninger-Lerchenthal, E. (1961). Heautoscopy. Wien. Med. Wochenschr. 111, 745.
76. Metzinger, T. (2003a). Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
77. Metzinger, T. (2003b). Phenomenal transparency and cognitive self-reference. Phenomenol. Cogn. Sci. 2, 353-393. doi: 10.1023/B:PHEN.0000007366.42918.eb.
78. Metzinger, T. (2004). "Why are identity-disorders interesting for philosophers?" in Philosophy and Psychiatry, eds T. Schramme and J. Thome (Berlin: de Gruyter. S.), 311-325.
79. Metzinger, T. (2006). Précis: being no one. Psyche (Stuttg). 11, 1-35.
80. Metzinger, T. (2007). Self models. Scholarpedia 2, 4174. doi: 10.4249/scholarpedia.4174.
81. Metzinger, T. (2008). Empirical perspectives from the self-model theory of subjectivity: a brief summary with examples. Prog. Brain Res. 168, 215-278. doi: 10.1016/S0079-6123(07)68018-2.
82. Metzinger, T. (2009). Why are out-of-body experiences interesting for philosophers? The theoretical relevance of OBE research. Cortex 45, 256-258. doi: 10.1016/j.cortex.2008.09.004.
83. Metzinger, T. (2013a). "Two principles for robot ethics," in Robotik und Gesetzgebung, eds E. Hilgendorf and J.-P. Günther (Baden-Baden: Nomos), 247-286.
84. Metzinger, T. (2013b). Why are dreams interesting for philosophers? The example of minimal phenomenal selfhood, plus an agenda for future research. Front. Psychol. 4:746. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00746.
85. Metzinger, T. (2014). "First-order embodiment, second-order embodiment, third-order embodiment," in The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition, ed L. A. Shapiro (London: Routledge).
86. Metzinger, T. (ed.). (1995). Conscious Experience. Thorverton: Imprint Academic.
87. Miles, L. K., Karpinska, K., Lumsden, J., Macrae, C. N., and Gilbert, S. (2010a). The meandering mind: vection and mental time travel. PLoS ONE 5:e10825. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0010825.
88. Miles, L. K., Nind, L. K., and Macrae, C. N. (2010b). Moving through time. Psychol. Sci. 21, 222-223. doi: 10.1177/0956797609359333.
89. Millikan, R. G. (1984). Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories: New Foundation for Realism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
90. Mooneyham, B. W., and Schooler, J. W. (2013). The costs and benefits of mind-wandering: a review. Can. J. Exp. Psychol. 67, 11-18. doi: 10.1037/a0031569.
91. Mrazek, M. D., Phillips, D. T., Franklin, M. S., Broadway, J. M., and Schooler, J. W. (2013). Young & restless: validation of the mind-wandering questionnaire (MWQ) reveals disruptive impact of mind-wandering for youth. Front. Psychol. 4:560. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00560.
92. Mrazek, M. D., Smallwood, J., and Schooler, J. W. (2012). Mindfulness and mind-wandering: finding convergence through opposing constructs. Emotion 12, 442. doi: 10.1037/a0026678.
93. Nielsen, T. A. (2000). A review of mentation in REM and NREM sleep: "covert" REM sleep as a possible reconciliation of two opposing models. Behav. Brain Sci. 23, 851-866. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X0000399X.
94. Noreika, V., Valli, K., Lahtela, H., and Revonsuo, A. (2009). Early-night serial awakenings as a new paradigm for studies on NREM dreaming. Int. J. Psychophysiol. 74, 14-18. doi: 10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2009.06.002.
95. Noreika, V., Windt, J. M., Lenggenhager, B., and Karim, A. A. (2010). New perspectives for the study of lucid dreaming: from brain stimulation to philosophical theories of self-consciousness. Int. J. Dream Res. 3, 36-45.
96. Ottaviani, C., and Couyoumdjian, A. (2013). Pros and cons of a wandering mind: a prospective study. Front. Psychol. 4:524. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00524.
97. Pace-Schott, E. F. (2013). Dreaming as a story-telling instinct. Front. Psychol. 4:159. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00159.
98. Palmer, S. E. (1978). "Fundamental aspects of cognitive representation," in Cognition and Categorization, eds E. Rosch and B. Lloyd (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum), 259-303.
99. Pohlmann, R. (1971). "Autonomie," in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie. Völlig neubearbeitete Ausgabe des «Wörterbuchs der philosophischen Begriffe» von Rudolf Eisler, Vol. 2004, eds J. Ritter and K. Gründer (Basel: Schwabe), 701.
100. Raffman, D. (1995). "On the persistence of phenomenology," in Conscious Experience, ed T. Metzinger (Cambridge, MA: Imprint Academic), 293-308.
101. Raichle, M. E., MacLeod, A. M., Snyder, A. Z., Powers, W. J., Gusnard, D. A., and Shulman, G. L. (2001). Inaugural article: a default mode of brain function. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 98, 676-682. doi: 10.1073/pnas.98.2.676.
102. Raymond, J. E., Shapiro, K. L., and Arnell, K. M. (1992). Temporary suppression of visual processing in an RSVP task: an attentional blink? J. Exp. Psychol. Hum. Percept. Perform. 18, 849. doi: 10.1037/0096-1523.18.3.849.
103. Redshaw, J., and Suddendorf, T. (2013). Foresight beyond the very next event: four-year-olds can link past and deferred future episodes. Front. Psychol. 4:404. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00404.
104. Samann, P. G., Wehrle, R., Hoehn, D., Spoormaker, V. I., Peters, H., Tully, C., et al. (2011). Development of the brain's default mode network from wakefulness to slow wave sleep. Cereb. Cortex 21, 2082-2093. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhq295.
105. Schad, D. J., Nuthmann, A., and Engbert, R. (2012). Your mind wanders weakly, your mind wanders deeply: objective measures reveal mindless reading at different levels. Cognition 125, 179-194. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2012.07.004.
106. Schmidt, R. E., Harvey, A. G., and van der Linden, M. (2011). Cognitive and affective control in insomnia. Front. Psychol. 2:349. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00349.
107. Schmidt, R. E., and van der Linden, M. (2009). The aftermath of rash action: sleep-interfering counterfactual thoughts and emotions. Emotion 9, 549-553. doi: 10.1037/a0015856.
108. Schooler, J. W., Smallwood, J., Christoff, K., Handy, T. C., Reichle, E. D., and Sayette, M. A. (2011). Meta-awareness, perceptual decoupling and the wandering mind. Trends Cogn. Sci. 15, 319-326. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2011.05.006.
109. Schupak, C., and Rosenthal, J. (2009). Excessive daydreaming: a case history and discussion of mind wandering and high fantasy proneness. Conscious. Cogn. 18, 290-292. doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2008.10.002.
110. Seli, P., Carriere, J. S. A., Levene, M., and Smilek, D. (2013). How few and far between? Examining the effects of probe rate on self-reported mind wandering. Front. Psychol. 4:430. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00430.
111. Seth, A. K. (2010). Measuring autonomy and emergence via granger causality. Artif. Life 16, 179-196. doi: 10.1162/artl.2010.16.2.16204.
112. Seth, A. K. (2013). Interoceptive inference, emotion, and the embodied self. Trends Cogn. Sci. 17, 565-573. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2013.09.007.
113. Seth, A. K., Suzuki, K., and Critchley, H. D. (2012). An interoceptive predictive coding model of conscious presence. Front. Psychol. 2:395. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00395.
114. Shapiro, K. L., Raymond, J. E., and Arnell, K. M. (1997). The attentional blink. Trends Cogn. Sci. 1, 291-296. doi: 10.1016/S1364-6613(97)01094-2.
115. Siclari, F., LaRocque, J. J., Postle, B. R., and Tononi, G. (2013). Assessing sleep consciousness within subjects using a serial awakening paradigm. Front. Psychol. 4:542. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00542.
116. Slagter, H. A., Davidson, R. J., and Lutz, A. (2011). Mental training as a tool in the neuroscientific study of brain and cognitive plasticity. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 5:17. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2011.00017.
117. Smallwood, J. (2013). Distinguishing how from why the mind wanders: a process-occurrence framework for self-generated mental activity. Psychol. Bull. 139, 519. doi: 10.1037/a0030010.
118. Smallwood, J., and Andrews-Hanna, J. (2013). Not all minds that wander are lost: the importance of a balanced perspective on the mind-wandering state. Front. Psychol. 4:441. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00441.
119. Smallwood, J., Brown, K., Baird, B., and Schooler, J. W. (2012). Cooperation between the default mode network and the frontal-parietal network in the production of an internal train of thought. Brain Res. 1428, 60-70. doi: 10.1016/j.brainres.2011.03.072.
120. Smallwood, J., McSpadden, M., and Schooler, J. W. (2007). The lights are on but no one's home: meta-awareness and the decoupling of attention when the mind wanders. Psychon. Bull. Rev. 14, 527-533. doi: 10.3758/BF03194102.
121. Smallwood, J., McSpadden, M., Luus, B., and Schooler, J. (2008). Segmenting the stream of consciousness: the psychological correlates of temporal structures in the time series data of a continuous performance task. Brain Cogn. 66, 50-56. doi: 10.1016/j.bandc.2007.05.004.
122. Smallwood, J., Ruby, F. J. M., and Singer, T. (2013). Letting go of the present: Mind-wandering is associated with reduced delay discounting. Conscious. Cogn. 22, 1-7. doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2012.10.007.
123. Smallwood, J., and Schooler, J. W. (2006). The restless mind. Psychol. Bull. 132, 946-958. doi: 10.1037/0033-2909.132.6.946.
124. Song, X., Wang, X., and Krueger, F. (2012). Mind wandering in Chinese daily lives-an experience sampling study. PLoS ONE 7:e44423. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0044423.
125. Spreng, R. N., Mar, R. A., and Kim, A. S. N. (2009). The common neural basis of autobiographical memory, prospection, navigation, theory of mind, and the default mode: a quantitative meta-analysis. J. Cogn. Neurosci. 21, 489-510. doi: 10.1162/jocn.2008.21029.
126. Stawarczyk, D., Cassol, H., and D'Argembeau, A. (2013). Phenomenology of future-oriented mind-wandering episodes. Front. Psychol. 4:425. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00425.
127. Stawarczyk, D., Majerus, S., Maquet, P., D'Argembeau, A., and Gilbert, S. (2011). Neural correlates of ongoing conscious experience: both task-unrelatedness and stimulus-independence are related to default network activity. PLoS ONE 6:e16997. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0016997.
128. Stawarczyk, D., Majerus, S., van der Linden, M., and D'Argembeau, A. (2012). Using the daydreaming frequency scale to investigate the relationships between mind-wandering, psychological well-being, and present-moment awareness. Front. Psychol. 3:363. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00363.
129. Stephens, G. L., and Graham, G. (2000). When Self-Consciousness Breaks: Alien Voices and Inserted Thoughts. Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press.
130. Stoljar, D. (2009). "Physicalism," in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available online at: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2009/entries/physicalism/.
131. Stumbrys, T., Erlacher, D., and Schredl, M. (2013). Testing the involvement of the prefrontal cortex in lucid dreaming: a tDCS study. Conscious. Cogn. 22, 1214-1222. doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2013.08.005.
132. Thomson, D. R., Besner, D., and Smilek, D. (2013). In pursuit of off-task thought: mind wandering-performance trade-offs while reading aloud and color naming. Front. Psychol. 4:360. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00360.
133. van Gaal, S., Ridderinkhof, K. R., Scholte, H. S., and Lamme, V. A. F. (2010). Unconscious activation of the prefrontal no-go network. J. Neurosci. 30, 4143-4150. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2992-09.2010.
134. Vanhaudenhuyse, A., Noirhomme, Q., Tshibanda, L. J.-F., Bruno, M.-A., Boveroux, P., Schnakers, C., et al. (2010). Default network connectivity reflects the level of consciousness in non-communicative brain-damaged patients. Brain 133, 161-171. doi: 10.1093/brain/awp313.
135. von Hippel, W., and Trivers, R. (2011). The evolution and psychology of self-deception. Behav. Brain Sci. 34, 1. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X10001354.
136. Voss, U., Holzmann, R., Tuin, I., and Hobson, J. (2009). Lucid dreaming: a state of consciousness with features of both waking and non-lucid dreaming. Sleep 32, 1191.
137. Voss, U., Schermelleh-Engel, K., Windt, J., Frenzel, C., and Hobson, A. (2013). Measuring consciousness in dreams: the lucidity and consciousness in dreams scale. Conscious. Cogn. 22, 8-21. doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2012.11.001.
138. Wamsley, E. J. (2013). Dreaming as an extension of waking conscious experience and a tractable problem for cognitive neuroscience. Front. Psychol. 4:637. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00637.
139. Wamsley, E. J., and Antrobus, J. S. (2009). The expression of trace conditioning during non-REM sleep and its relation to subjective experience. Neurobiol. Learn. Mem. 92, 283-291. doi: 10.1016/j.nlm.2009.02.012.
140. Ward, A. F., and Wegner, D. M. (2013). Mind-blanking: when the mind goes away. Front. Psychol. 4:650. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00650.
141. Wegner, D. M. (2002). The Illusion of Conscious Will. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
142. Weissman, D. H., Roberts, K. C., Visscher, K. M., and Woldorff, M. G. (2006). The neural bases of momentary lapses in attention. Nat. Neurosci. 9, 971-978. doi: 10.1038/nn1727.
143. Windt, J. M. (2010). The immersive spatiotemporal hallucination model of dreaming. Phenomenol. Cogn. Sci. 9, 295-316. doi: 10.1007/s11097-010-9163-1.
144. Windt, J. M. (2013). Reporting dream experience: Why (not) to be skeptical about dream reports. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 7:708. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00708.
145. Windt, J. M. (2014). Dreaming: A Conceptual Framework for Philosophy of Mind and Empirical Research. Cambridge: MIT Press.
146. Windt, J. M., and Metzinger, T. (2007). "The philosophy of dreaming and self-consciousness: what happens to the experiential subject during the dream state?" in Praeger Perspectives. The New Science of Dreaming, Vol. 3. Cultural and Theoretical Perspectives (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers/Greenwood Publishing Group), 193-247.