CONTEXT Wandering spleen is a rare medical entity in which the spleen is orphaned of its usual peritoneal attachments and thus assumes an ever wandering and hypermobile state. This laxity of attachments may even cause torsion of the splenic pedicle. Both gastric volvulus and wandering spleen share a common embryology owing to maldevelopment of the dorsal mesentery. Gastric volvulus complicating...

This article argues that the default network, augmented by secondary visual and sensorimotor cortices, is the likely neural correlate of dreaming. This hypothesis is based on a synthesis of work on dream content, the findings on the contents and neural correlates of mind-wandering, and the results from EEG and neuroimaging studies of REM sleep. Relying on studies in the 1970s that serendipitous...

On the basis of the executive-attention theory of working memory capacity (WMC; e.g., M. J. Kane, A. R. A. Conway, D. Z. Hambrick, & R. W. Engle, 2007), the authors tested the relations among WMC, mind wandering, and goal neglect in a sustained attention to response task (SART; a go/no-go task). In 3 SART versions, making conceptual versus perceptual processing demands, subjects periodically in...

An often-overlooked characteristic of the human mind is its propensity to wander. Despite growing interest in the science of mind-wandering, most studies operationalize mind-wandering by its task-unrelated contents, which may be orthogonal to the processes constraining how thoughts are evoked and unfold over time. In this chapter, we emphasize the importance of incorporating such processes into...

Mind wandering is frequently defined as task-unrelated or perceptually decoupled thought. However, these definitions may not capture the dynamic features of a wandering mind, such as its tendency to 'move freely'. Here we test the relationship between three theoretically dissociable dimensions of thought: freedom of movement in thought, task-relatedness, and perceptual decoupling (i.e., lack of...

In a large sample of early adolescents (T2: N 1⁄4 1023; M age 1⁄4 13.51; 55.5% girls), the impact of parental protection and unsupervised wandering on adolescents’ antisocial behavior 2.5 years later was tested in this TRAILS study; gender and parental knowledge were controlled for. In addition, the level of biological maturation and having antisocial friends were included as possible moderator...

In this comment, we contrast different conceptions of mind wandering that were presented in 2 recent theoretical reviews: Smallwood and Schooler (2006) and Watkins (2008). We also introduce a new perspective on the role of executive control in mind wandering by integrating empirical evidence presented in Smallwood and Schooler with 2 theoretical frameworks: Watkins's elaborated control theory a...

OBJECTIVE In adulthood, depressive mood is often comorbid with ADHD, but its role in ADHD-inattentiveness and especially relations with mind wandering remains to be elucidated. This study investigated the effects of laboratory-induced dysphoric mood on task-unrelated mind wandering and its consequences on cognitive task performance in college students with high (n = 46) or low (n = 44) ADHD-Ina...

This metatheoretical paper investigates mind wandering from the perspective of philosophy of mind. It has two central claims. The first is that, on a conceptual level, mind wandering can be fruitfully described as a specific form of mental autonomy loss. The second is that, given empirical constraints, most of what we call "conscious thought" is better analyzed as a subpersonal process that mor...

We describe conditions under which a multiply connected wandering domain of a transcendental meromorphic function with a finite number of poles must be a Baker wandering domain, and we discuss the possible eventual connectivity of Fatou components of transcendental meromorphic functions. We also show that if f is meromorphic, U is a bounded component of F (f) and V is the component of F (f) suc...