Scotsman Obituaries: Jonathan Smallwood, psychology professor fascinated by the wandering mind

Jonny attended Largs Academy and then Strathclyde University, where he studied Psychology and earned his BA (1996) and PhD (2002) under the guidance of Dr Marc Obonswain.

After his undergraduate degree, he realised that while Psychology had provided detailed theories of vision, attention, memory and language, it had little to say about internal mental states – for example, how our thoughts drift depending on mood, context and intention. His PhD, completed in 2002, focused on what he called “task-unrelated thought,” and pioneered the scientific study of mind-wandering and spontaneous thought.

From 2002-2004 Jonny was a Lecturer at Glasgow Caledonian University before travelling to Vancouver to work with Professor Jonathan Schooler as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of British Columbia (2004–2006). From 2006-2008 he was a lecturer in Psychology at the University of Aberdeen, after which he returned to North America to work with Prof Schooler as an assistant project scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. From 2011-2013 he was a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in the Department of Social Neuroscience in Leipzig, Germany.

In August 2013 he joined the Psychology department at the University of York and in August 2018 he was promoted to Professor. From July 2020 until his death, he held a Professorship at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, where he ran the THinC Lab.

Jonny’s fascination with the mind, the brain and how they work meant he would happily stay up all night, in any part of the world, discussing the processes involved in thought, always wanting to reach a better understanding by bouncing around ideas. For Jonny, scientific inspiration came not just from observations and experiments, but from anywhere and everywhere, from music to cricket to football to archaeology and everything in between. Jonny’s work showed that the richness of our inner experience is grounded in the brain’s activity.

Amongst his proudest achievements were the support and mentoring he gave to the many people he trained and collaborated with around the world, the 251 papers he published and the unique perspectives he brought to his work, which form his legacy in the world of science.

In 2006, Jonny published his most seminal work, The Restless Mind (Psychological Bulletin), which set the foundation for myriad research in spontaneous thought.

Until his death, and continuing through his students and collaborators, Jonny’s contributions made remarkable progress in developing sophisticated methods to capture the dynamics of thought, map them onto large-scale patterns of brain activity and, together, try to understand how these processes unfold across various contexts and environments. Since 2019 his work was ranked in the top 1 per cent of cited publications in the fields of Neuroscience and Psychology.

Jonathan’s companion in life and support throughout his career and travels was his beloved wife Helga. Together they travelled the world making friends, drinking margaritas and taking wonderful photographs.

In his leisure time, Jonny enjoyed making music, which he published on Spotify, Apple Music, and SoundCloud as Natural Philosophers With Attitude (NpWA).

He died with Helga and other family members at his side on 24 October 2025 in West Kilbride.

Jonathan will be sadly missed by his colleagues and friends, and his wife and family, including his brother Luke, sister Danielle and his four nephews.

Obituaries

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