Arnaud Delorme is a university professor at Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse, France. He is also an adjunct faculty member at the Schwarz Center for Computational Neuroscience at the University of California San Diego and a consulting research scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. His research encompasses pure neuroscience methods as well as the neurology involved in mind wandering. He is the author of Why Our Minds Wander: Understand the Science and Learn How to Focus Your Thoughts.

Arnaud explores the neuroscience of mind wandering, explaining how spontaneous thought arises, why it is universal, and how it relates to meditation and brain networks. He discusses the default mode network, metacognition, and how awareness of wandering thoughts reveals the dynamic nature of consciousness. Delorme also shares practical insights into tuning the mind through meditation and understanding the evolutionary, emotional, and creative roles of mind wandering.

00:01 Introduction: mind-wandering begins

01:41 Defining mind-wandering in neuroscience

04:46 Meditation and internal attention

07:19 Evolutionary reasons for wandering

11:02 Voluntary versus involuntary thoughts

14:53 Consciousness as primary experience

19:33 Training attention and tuning thought

20:58 Default mode network explained

31:09 Cycles of focus and wandering

41:09 Conclusion

(Recorded on November 7, 2025)

Check out New Thinking Allowed’s AI chatbot. You can create a free account at awakin.ai/open/jeffreymishlove. When you enter the space, you will see that our chatbot is one of several you can interact with. While it is still a work in progress, it has been trained on 1,600 NTA transcripts. It can provide intelligent answers about the contents of our interviews. It’s almost like having a conversation with Jeffrey Mishlove.

For a short video on How to Get the Most From New Thinking Allowed, go to

https://youtu.be/aVbfPFGxv9o

Check out the New Thinking Allowed Foundation website at http://www.newthinkingallowed.org. There you will find our incredible, searchable database as well as opportunities to shop and to support our video productions – plus, this is where people can subscribe to our FREE, weekly Newsletter and can download a FREE .pdf copy of our quarterly magazine.

To order high-quality, printed copies of our quarterly magazine:

https://nta-magazine.magcloud.com/

To order the second book in the New Thinking Allowed Dialogues series, Russell Targ: Ninety Years of ESP, Remote Viewing, and Timeless Awareness, go to https://amzn.to/4aw2iyr

To order a copy of New Thinking Allowed Dialogues: UFOs and UAP – Are We Really Alone?, go to https://amzn.to/3Y0VOVh To order a copy of Charles T. Tart: Seventy Years of Exploring Consciousness and Parapsychology, go to https://amzn.to/41jIX1o

To order a copy of Charles T. Tart: Seventy Years of Exploring Consciousness and Parapsychology, go to https://amzn.to/4oOUJLn

Download and read Jeffrey Mishlove’s Grand Prize essay in the Bigelow Institute competition, Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death, go to https://www.bigelowinstitute.org/docs/1st.pdf

To order Why Our Minds Wander, by Arnaud Delorme, go to https://amzn.to/4o3L3Lt

Published on December 1, 2025