{"id":110019,"date":"2020-07-16T04:04:51","date_gmt":"2020-07-16T11:04:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/07\/discovery-of-thought-worms-opens-window-to-the-mind"},"modified":"2020-07-16T12:46:19","modified_gmt":"2020-07-16T19:46:19","slug":"discovery-of-thought-worms-opens-window-to-the-mind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/07\/discovery-of-thought-worms-opens-window-to-the-mind","title":{"rendered":"Discovery of \u2018thought worms\u2019 opens window to the mind"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/discovery-of-thought-worms-opens-window-to-the-mind2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Queen\u2019s University researchers uncover brain-based marker of new thoughts and discover we have more than 6,000 thoughts each day.<\/p>\n<p>Researchers at Queen\u2019s University have established a method that, for the first time, can detect indirectly when one thought ends and another begins. Dr. Jordan Poppenk (Psychology) and his master\u2019s student, Julie Tseng, devised a way to isolate \u201cthought worms,\u201d consisting of consecutive moments when a person is focused on the same idea. This research was recently published in Nature Communications.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhat we call thought worms are adjacent points in a simplified representation of activity patterns in the brain. The brain occupies a different point in this \u2018state space\u2019 at every moment. When a person moves onto a new thought, they create a new thought worm that we can detect with our methods,\u201d explains Dr. Poppenk, who is the Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience. \u201cWe also noticed that thought worms emerge right as new events do when people are watching movies. Drilling into this helped us validate the idea that the appearance of a new thought worm corresponds to a thought transition.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Queen\u2019s University researchers uncover brain-based marker of new thoughts and discover we have more than 6,000 thoughts each day. Researchers at Queen\u2019s University have established a method that, for the first time, can detect indirectly when one thought ends and another begins. Dr. Jordan Poppenk (Psychology) and his master\u2019s student, Julie Tseng, devised a way [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1509,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-110019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-entertainment","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110019","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110019"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110019\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":110033,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110019\/revisions\/110033"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}