Banellis et al. (2026) — Uncovering the embodied dimension of the wandering mind
The wiki’s first study of what people think about when nothing is asked of them, and its first to find that a meaningful share of that is the body. 536 participants lay in a scanner for 14 minutes and were then asked, without warning, 22 questions about the stream of thought they had just had — 14 of them the standard multidimensional experience sampling battery, and 8 newly written to ask about breath, heart, stomach, bladder, skin, movement, body and arousal.
Same senior author and same research programme as the decorrelation paper ingested one run earlier, and a very different kind of study: that one asked how well people perceive the body, this one asks how often they think about it.
What was measured
| layer | instrument | N |
|---|---|---|
| ongoing thought | MDES, 22 items, 0–100 VAS, retrospective, order randomized | 536 |
| brain | 14-min resting-state fMRI; Schaefer-200 + 16 subcortical parcels → 216-node connectivity | 489 |
| body | photoplethysmography, respiration belt, electrogastrography | subsets |
| symptoms | ASRS (ADHD), MDI (depression); PHQ-15 and STAI-T as controls | 536 |
Four analytic stages, deliberately escalating: item-level correlations → EFA → CCA against whole-brain connectivity → convergence check between the unsupervised and brain-constrained solutions.
The finding, and the paradox inside it
Body-wandering is affectively negative. Thoughts about the heart, bladder, skin and stomach travel with reduced positive and increased negative affect, and with higher heart rate and lower parasympathetic HRV. Thoughts about the past, the future, other people and one’s focus travel with the opposite of all of that. EFA turns this into a single bipolar axis: visceral-and-negative at one pole, social-and-pleasant at the other.
And body-wandering goes with fewer symptoms. Heart, bladder and skin thoughts correlate negatively with both ADHD and depression scores. Depression’s positive correlate is instead mental time travel — past and future — which is what the rumination literature would predict.
Set those side by side and the naive reading fails. A state that is unpleasant in the moment and physiologically aroused is associated with less trait psychopathology than a state that feels pleasant and calm. The authors’ own interpretation, which they label speculative: attention to bodily sensation “reflects preserved engagement with ongoing sensory input,” and such engagement may be protective relative to forms of mind-wandering that are decoupled from the present body. Negative affect during rest is not the same thing as maladaptive cognition.
This should be read against the wiki’s most closely related result. Farb et al. (2011) found that elaborative self-referential reactivity predicts depressive relapse while sensory reactivity protects, and felt sadness predicts nothing — which is the same shape: what harms is not how bad it feels but whether the mind is elaborating away from the present or staying with it. Banellis et al. supply that dissociation at rest, in a large unselected sample, with the sensory pole finally interoceptive rather than visual. See is-more-interoceptive-awareness-better, where this becomes the page’s first row that separates momentary valence from trait outcome.
The brain result is the surprising one
Mind-wandering research is a DMN literature. The canonical account has self-generated thought arising from DMN dynamics with frontoparietal control and salience networks, and treats mind-wandering as decoupling from sensorimotor input.
The CCA finds something else. The single significant cross-validated mode (out-of-sample r = 0.354) is anchored on thalamus and striatum coupling to primary somatosensory and motor cortex, with right thalamus as the dominant hub (53 high-loading edges) and insula/cingulate recruited alongside. Body-wandering is not sensorimotor disengagement; it is sensorimotor integration during internal experience.
The gradient analysis makes this precise rather than merely contrarian. The mode’s topography aligns with Gradient 1 — the principal unimodal-to-transmodal axis (Margulies et al. 2016) — with its negative pole at the somatomotor anchor and its positive pole at transmodal frontal/cingulate cortex. Body-focused thought bridges the hierarchy rather than sitting at either end of it.
Two reasons to take the connectivity result more seriously than a single multivariate fit usually deserves: it held in 4 of 5 cross-validation folds, and the entirely separate unsupervised EFA factor’s connectivity map correlates r = 0.431 with it, while the mental-time-travel factor’s map does not (r = 0.061). Supervised and unsupervised routes converge on one substrate.
The methodological divergence worth recording
The EFA and the CCA do not pick the same body. Unsupervised, the loading order is skin, heart, bladder, stomach — the organs, opposed to social thought. Brain-constrained, it is stomach, arousal, breath, movement — and the opposing social pole largely disappears (other = 0.20, positive affect = 0.14, both weakly positive).
The authors treat this as partial overlap between related constructs, and the convergence analysis supports that. But it is worth naming what changed: letting the brain vote reweights body-wandering toward the gastric, respiratory and arousal channels and away from the bipolar body-versus-social structure. For a wiki that has been sceptical of single-channel generalization, this is a useful demonstration that which interoceptive channel appears “central” can be an artefact of the analysis chosen.
Where it sits in the wiki
It gives the resting state a body. Every fMRI page here treats rest as a baseline. This paper’s own framing — the Significance statement says as much — is that the resting state has been treated as a purely cognitive baseline while the participant is in fact lying in a tube having a bodily experience. Given how much of this wiki’s neuroanatomy rests on resting-state connectivity (salience-network, default-mode-network, central-autonomic-network), that is a general caution and not only a finding.
It is a sensibility measure, and the sibling paper says what that costs. Body-wandering is self-reported attention to the body — not accuracy, not precision, not metacognitive efficiency. Banellis et al.’s other 2026 paper found that the quantity which behaves like a person-level trait is confidence, and that performance is organ-specific. Body-wandering is on the trait-like side of that split, which is consistent with it showing stable individual differences (ICC 0.88–0.94) — and which means it cannot be assumed to track any perceptual ability. The two papers should be read as complementary halves: what generalizes across a person is how they relate to the body, not how well they read it. See interoceptive-taxonomy.
It does not contradict anything on the wiki. No page here claimed body-focused thought is DMN-based, and no page claimed spontaneous body attention is a marker of psychopathology in a specific direction. What it does is add a construct — body-wandering — and one genuinely awkward data point to is-more-interoceptive-awareness-better.
Provenance notes
PNAS Direct Submission, edited by Daniel L. Schacter; received August 2025, accepted February 2026, published 25 March 2026. Open under CC BY-NC-ND. Data and code public (github.com/embodied-computation-group/body_wandering_CCA). Funded by Lundbeckfonden and ERC Starting Grants to micah-allen and Francesca Fardo; no declared conflicts.
Jonathan Smallwood — second-to-last author, the field’s central mind-wandering figure and the source of the MDES framework this paper extends — is recorded in the byline as deceased, 24 October 2025. He supervised the analysis and co-wrote the paper. No researcher page is created for him here (single appearance in raw/, per the co-author convention), but the MDES lineage the multidimensional-experience-sampling page records is his.