How your brain decides what to think

By Valerie van Mulukom, Assistant Professor in Cognitive Science, Coventry University

You’re sitting on the plane, staring out of the window at the clouds and all of a sudden, you think back to how a few months ago, you had a heart-to-heart with a good colleague about the pressure you experience at work. How do thoughts seemingly completely unrelated to the present pop into our heads? Why do we remember certain things and not others? Why does our mind go off on tangents and why do we have daydreams?

Underlying these processes is a shared pattern of common brain activity, in regions which together make up the “default…

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