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. 2021 Sep 20;47(1):329–348. doi: 10.1038/s41386-021-01147-7

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© The Author(s) 2021

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Fig. 3 — Deliberate and automatic constraints serve to limit the contents of thought and how these contents change over time. Deliberate constraints are implemented through cognitive control, whereas automatic constraints can be considered as a family of mechanisms that operate outside of cognitive control, including sensory or affective salience. Generally speaking, deliberate constraints are minimal during dreaming, tend to increase somewhat further during psychedelic states and more so during mind-wandering, increase further during creative thinking, and are strongest during goal-directed thought. There is a range of low-to-medium level automatic constraints that can occur during dreaming, psychedelic states, mind-wandering, and creative thinking, but thought ceases to be spontaneous at the strongest levels of automatic constraint, such as during rumination or obsessive thought. Creative thinking may feature pronounced oscillations between different modes of thought that feature varying amounts of automatic and deliberate constraints (indicated by arrows on the figure) [19].