“We had our breakthrough by giving up on trying to understand what a person is thinking about, and instead focusing on when they have moved on,” Poppenk explained. “Our methods help us detect when a person is thinking something new, without regard to what the new thought is. You could say that we’ve skipped over vocabulary in an effort to understand the punctuation of the language of the mind.”
That being said, the technique also needs some fine-tuning. One of the key drawbacks of the study is that it requires researchers to have a template for every thought they want to examine, which essentially means that they must have a clear understanding of what the individual is thinking about in order to recognize the number of changes between thoughts.
Despite these weak points, new research still opens up some potential doors for investigation. It would be fascinating, for example, to know how the flow of people’s thoughts shifts under various situations, such as under the influence of drugs or stress.
“For example, how does mentation rate – the rate at which thought transitions occur – relate to a person’s ability to pay attention for a long period? Also, can measures of thought dynamics serve a clinical function? For example, our methods could possibly support early detection of disordered thought in schizophrenia, or rapid thought in ADHD or mania,” Poppenk said. “We think the methods offer a lot of potential; we hope to make heavy use of them in our upcoming work.”
