Sepehr Mortaheb

Educational neuroscience outreach programs promote neuroscience literacy, science interest, and brain health among school-aged students, ranging from neuroscience-informed psychoeducation (NIPE) to engagement for neuroscience careers. However, their implementation, delivery, and evaluation remain poorly understood. This chapter examined programs through three questions: (1) Where and in what institutional contexts were students targeted? (2) How were programs delivered? and (3) What neuroscience content was taught and what outcomes were reported. A PRISMA-guided review searched PubMed from inception to 2025 for empirical studies of neuroscience-based educational/outreach programs targeting students aged ~5–18 years. Eligible studies reported outcomes of structured neuroscience education in school/community settings. Data included characteristics, design, content, delivery, implementation, and outcomes, and findings informed a translational roadmap. Forty-three studies met the inclusion criteria. Publications increased substantially after 2019, with approximately 65% of studies published during this period. Most programs were conducted in the United States (67.4%), implemented in schools (76.7%), and targeted high school students (58.1%). Activity-based programs were most common (41.9%), often single-day interventions (44.2%), with teachers’ moderators (44.2%) rather than trained implementers (23.3%). Content most commonly addressed addiction (25.6%), cellular/molecular (23.3%), and cognitive neuroscience (20.9%). Knowledge gain (27.9%) and attitudes/interest toward neuroscience (25.6%) were frequently evaluated. The findings provide a foundation for applying neuroscience education to NIPE-oriented goals, including brain and mental health literacy, skills and competencies, and health-related decision-making, while also supporting STEM and neuroscience career engagement. The proposed translational roadmap emphasizes global access, developmental tailoring, stronger school–academic partnerships, sustainable implementation, and rigorous, standardized evaluation to guide future educational neuroscience outreach and NIPE-informed education.

Mind Blanking (MB) is a mental state characterized by the experience of a seemingly empty mind. This apparent emptiness challenges the theoretical view of a continuous and content-full stream of thought, leading to the question of how it is possible to capture MB events in the first place. MB research has relied largely on probe-caught experience-sampling, during which participants are interrupted at random times to report their mental state. This approach risks missing some MB events as they may occur between probes. Self-caught paradigms, on the other hand, allow participants to report MB upon spontaneously realizing it, relying on meta-awareness. To date, it is not clear whether these two methods capture the same phenomenon neuronally. Here, we investigated whether probe-caught MB (pMB) and self-caught MB (sMB) converge on their behavioral properties and brain correlates. Twenty-two participants underwent 3T fMRI scanning while performing both a pMB and a sMB experience-sampling task. We compared the behavioral properties, BOLD activations and time-varying functional connectivity (FC) across the two approaches. We found that reporting frequencies of pMB and sMB were significantly correlated across individuals, and both MB reports were uniformly distributed over time, pointing towards a behavioral convergence across approaches. However, we observed a divergence in BOLD activations, as sMB recruited significantly greater activation in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) compared to pMB, likely reflecting the meta-awareness and metacognitive monitoring required for self-detecting a MB. Lastly, time-varying FC analysis revealed a convergence, with both pMB and sMB FC resembling a hyperconnectivity pattern compared to other content-full mental states, pointing towards low arousal FC. Together, our results show that sMB and pMB converge on overlapping neurobehavioral correlates. This positions the self-caught method as a complementary tool for studying MB without external interruption, while highlighting the role of meta-awareness in self-report detection.

Mind-blanking (MB) is the inability to report mental events during unconstraint thinking. Previous work shows that MB is linked to decreased levels of cortical arousal, indicating dominance of cerebral mechanisms when reporting mental states. What remains inconclusive is whether MB can also ensue from autonomic arousal manipulations, pointing to the implication of peripheral physiology to mental events. Using experience-sampling, neural, and physiological measurements in 26 participants, we first show that MB was reported more frequently in low arousal conditions, elicited by sleep deprivation. Also, there was partial evidence for a higher number of MB reports in high arousal conditions, elicited by intense physical exercise. Transition probabilities revealed that, after sleep deprivation, mind-wandering was more likely to be followed by MB and less likely to be followed by more mind-wandering reports. Using classification schemes, we show higher performance of a balanced random forest classifier trained on both neural and physiological markers in comparison to performance when solely neural or physiological were used. Collectively, we show that both cortical and autonomic arousal affect MB report occurrences. Our results establish that MB is supported by combined brain-body configurations, and, by linking mental and physiological states they pave the way for novel, embodied accounts of spontaneous thinking.

To provide insights into neurophenomenological richness after psilocybin intake, we investigated the link between dynamical brain patterns and the ensuing phenomenological pattern after psilocybin intake. Healthy participants received either psilocybin (n=22) or placebo (n=27) while in ultra-high field 7T MRI scanning. Changes in the phenomenological patterns were quantified using the 5-Dimensional Altered States of Consciousness (5D-ASC) Rating Scale, revealing alterations across all dimensions under psilocybin. Changes in the neurobiological patterns displayed that psilocybin induced widespread increases in averaged functional connectivity. Time-varying connectivity analysis unveiled a recurrent hyperconnected pattern characterized by low BOLD signal amplitude, suggesting heightened cortical arousal. In terms of neurophenomenology, canonical correlation analysis primarily linked the transition probabilities of the hyperconnected pattern with feelings of oceanic boundlessness (OBN), and secondly with visionary restructuralization. We suggest that the brain’s tendency to enter a hyperconnected-hyperarousal pattern under psilocybin represents the potential to entertain variant mental associations. For the first time, these findings link brain dynamics with phenomenological alterations, providing new insights into the neurophenomenology and neurophysiology of the psychedelic state.