Mind-wandering in people with hippocampal amnesia

Abstract

Subjective inner experiences, such as mind-wandering, represent the fundaments of human cognition. While the precise function of mind-wandering is still debated, it is increasingly acknowledged to have influence across cognition on processes such as future planning, creative thinking and problem-solving, and even on depressive rumination and other mental health disorders. Recently, there has been important progress in characterizing mind-wandering and identifying the neural networks associated with it. Two prominent features of mind-wandering are mental time travel and visuo-spatial imagery, which are often associated with the hippocampus. People with amnesia arising from selective bilateral hippocampal damage ( hippocampal amnesia) cannot vividly recall events from their past, envision their future or imagine fictitious scenes. This raises the question of whether the hippocampus plays a causal role in mind-wandering and if so, in what way. Leveraging a unique opportunity to shadow people with hippocampal amnesia for several days, we examined, for the first time, what they thought about spontaneously, without direct task demands. We found that they engaged in as much mind-wandering as control participants. However, whereas controls thought flexibly and creatively about the past, present and future, imagining vivid visual scenes, hippocampal amnesia resulted in thoughts primarily about the present comprising verbally-mediated semantic knowledge. These findings expose the hippocampus as a key pillar in the neural architecture of mind-wandering and also reveal its impact beyond memory, placing it at the heart of human mental life.\n\nSignificance statementHumans tend to mind-wander about 30-50% of their waking time. Two prominent features of this pervasive form of thought are mental time travel and visuo-spatial imagery, which are often associated with the hippocampus. To examine whether the hippocampus plays a causal role in mind-wandering, we examined the frequency and phenomenology of mind-wandering in patients with selective bilateral hippocampal damage. We found that they engaged in as much mind-wandering as controls. However, hippocampal damage changed the form and content of mind-wandering from flexible, episodic, and scene-based to abstract, semanticized, and verbal. These findings expose the hippocampus as a key pillar in the neural architecture of mind-wandering and reveal its impact beyond memory, placing it at the heart of our mental life.