Thinking aloud while letting the mind wander does not substantially alter the stream of consciousness compared to thinking silently. In two studies with 111 and 102 participants, people who verbalized their ongoing thoughts showed no significant differences in meta-awareness or how often their topics shifted. Of 21 thought qualities and 18 content topics examined, only three qualities (private thoughts, mind blanking, and session difficulty) and one topic (partner, intimacy, love, and sexual matters) differed between conditions. Cognitive load also did not differ. The findings indicate that the Think Aloud method is a reliable and minimally reactive tool for studying the natural flow of thoughts in task-absent settings.
The spontaneous stream of thought (SST), often called the stream of consciousness, exhibits a "clump-and-jump" structure: clusters of related thoughts about a topic followed by a jump to a new topic, in a repeating pattern. Multiple lines of evidence support this structure, including high interrater agreement in identifying jumps, corroboration by automated text analytic methods, identification by a data-driven algorithm, and inferred presence in unverbalized SST. Jumps involve a discontinuous shift where a new clump is only modestly related to the previous one. These results illuminate serial structure in SST and invite research into the processes generating the pattern.