Peter Daniel Simor is the holder of the Language, communication and the brain – ILCB/Iméra Chair. His project at Iméra, the Institute for Advanced Study of Aix-Marseille University, aims to to work on a comprehensive review that contextualizes and discusses the putative role of mind-wandering in information processing, and elaborates on the influence of covert sleep states on the phenomenological and neurocognitive aspects of mind-wandering in healthy and pathological conditions. This interdisciplinary approach aims to integrate the scientific achievements of basic and clinical sleep research, the cognitive neuroscience of learning and memory, as well as the study of consciousness and subjective experience.
To learn more, view his resident page by clicking here
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0:08 I'm Peter Shimor. I'm an associate professor at the Ötvös Lorand University Institute of Psychology in Budapest. And I'm a psychologist with a particular interest in sleep and dreaming. I obtained my PhD in Budapest and then I quickly had the luck to organize my own sleep lab. But with a short break I went to Brussels to spend postdoctoral research. With my lab we are studying a variety of topics. First I started to investigate nightmare disorder that was a quite neglected sleep disorder at that time. But after that we extended our topics and now we are studying a variety of areas in
0:48 relation to sleep and dreaming. Such as lucid dreaming, the role of sleep in information processing, the relationship between sleep and mental health and recently also mind wandering. We are using in the lab different techniques from psychometric tools to sleep EEG, electroencephalography. This is our main method that we apply to study the neural activity during sleep. The goal of the project is to study the potential benefits of mind-wandering, especially in relation to information processing. What is mind-wandering? Mind-wandering is a state when our attention drifts away from the current task and we
1:25 engage in internally generated spontaneous cognitive processes, like thinking about the past, imagining the future, or thinking about future goals. Mind-wandering has a very bad reputation. Different studies show that mind-wandering is associated with poor cognitive performance in a variety of tasks, especially those that require attention. But humans engage in mind-wandering in 60 % of their time, so we wondered whether it might have any potential positive benefits. And there are a variety of tasks that do not acquire attention.
2:00 And we studied the positive influence of mind-wandering on information processing within the frames of a probabilistic learning task, which measures how humans are able to capture hidden information that is in the environment, and also the links between different inputs, without intention, without awareness. And we showed that mind-wandering actually facilitates this process. So mind-wandering is not necessarily bad. We may consolidate, integrate, and extract information while we are not attending to the environment. It's funny because the idea to study the positive aspect of mind-wandering came when I was
2:38 mind-wandering, especially during the period of the COVID pandemic, when I was in Brussels, and all the laboratories were closed, so I had many time to mind-wonder. And the idea to study mind-wandering in relation to information processing came during that period, and I quickly just called a colleague, actually a former Imera Fellow, who is a cognitive scientist, now a professor in Lyon, to study that. And our conversation quickly grew into a larger collaboration involving researchers from Norway and also France. And now our aim is to study the links between mind-wandering and information processing in
3:15 relation to sleep. That's why we also included other experts in sleep research. So my aim is to collaborate with the expert team of neurophysiologists, working at the ENS, the partner team of the ELCB. And our aim is to study the neural underpinnings of the role of mind-wandering in information processing. Thank you.
