Glad this one is out, more work on spontaneous cognition to come. A small step for the field, a giant step for me. Thanks to all my collaborators and my mentor, Dr. Jess Andrews-Hanna

A state involving the MTL and DAN engaged later during internal thought verbalization. This state was also associated with a LLM-derived surprisal metric, perplexity, signaling novelty and internal event boundaries. Here is another fascinating story on perpelxity. bsky.app/profile/yuhu...

A brain state with activation in core DMN regions tracked early emergence of internally oriented thought, while a state involving control and dorsal attention networks tracked externally oriented thought.

HMM provides a new approach to study spontaneous thought that naturally integrates thought content and dynamics (transitions) under one framework. We fit 8 hidden states to BOLD signals, with interpretable signatures.

A super fun project thanks to my wonderful co-authors: Dr. Quentin Raffaelli, @simoneluchini.bsky.social @roger-beaty.bsky.social , Dr. Jessica Andrews-Hannna.

We are excited about the potential of this flexible, intuitive and automated measure: testing process-centered creativity theory, phenotyping divergent thinking in vast verbal data generated in naturalistic contexts.
Did I mention the neural substrate of perplexity? www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

We use perplexity from an LLM to assess "surprise" in various verbalized texts: stream-of-consciousness, prompted thought, and solutions in creative problem-solving. Guess what? Perplexity is directly linked to people's capacity for divergent thinking.