The Brain's Default Mode Network

This book excerpt is from a chapter titled "Daydreaming and Mind-wandering as Creative Tools" of?my award winning?book "IN/ACTION: Rethinking the Path to Results", available to buy online where you buy books. You can read more about me?here?and more about the book?here.

Our understanding of our brain made a major leap forward in 1998 when American neurologist Marcus Raichle wrote his seminal paper on the Default Mode Network (DMN). He and his colleagues had observed that when the mind doesn’t have anything to do, it starts processing everything it knows from the past and starts planning the future. It starts to make sense of it all. Certain parts of the brain come alive when this activity (or non-activity!) is going on. The DMN is different from those parts of the brain that come alive when we are focused on a task.

To understand this more in depth, I reached out to Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, professor and brain researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She explained to me, “When we are engaging with a task, we are taking in information; we are not generally making deep meaning out of it. It is our ability to decouple from the outside world that allows us to make rich, ethical meaning out of life.” As I understood her, when the DMN is active, the brain starts considering our values, life purpose, ethics, morals, and so on and applies it to the data we previously took in through our senses.

As Raichle puts it, “The brain is in the prediction business.” When it’s taking in sensory information, it starts processing it. When it is doing nothing, it is connecting the dots, planning, and building a future. In an editorial piece for a University of California, Berkeley publication called “How Mind-Wandering May Be Good for You,” writer and former psychologist Jill Suttie points out a collection of research indicating that mind-wandering can help with job performance and goal setting among other things. If the mind is allowed to roam freely, the chances of a creative insight, the “aha moment,” are higher than when we are focused on something all the time.

Come to think of it, this should come as no surprise. Think Archimedes and Newton, connecting the dots toward their major discoveries while chilling out in a bathtub or under the apple tree. Many people talk of getting their best ideas in the shower or while driving. While spontaneous mind-wandering is a great source of ideas, could we strategically harness this capability?

While writing this book, I decided to experiment and allow mind-wandering instead of intercepting it. It wasn’t easy. A couple of minutes in, I would automatically pick up the phone to check news feeds or play music. Soon, it became more natural. Tiny idea bombs would burst forth; even sentences and phrases for this book would show up, which I would then develop later on. Months later, I had forgotten all about this experiment, and life got busy. Finishing the manuscript became a deadline-driven activity. During my final weeks of writing the manuscript, I recreated my calendar to make sure I was balancing my time well. I remembered the abandoned mind-wandering experiment. I added what seemed like a weird entry into my calendar: thirty minutes of mind-wandering twice a week. The idea was not to sit and mind-wander at that exact time, but to serve as a reminder to deliberately make time for it. Even a twenty-minute period of staring out the window, doing nothing, would help me remember all sorts of research and interesting ideas I had accumulated months earlier.

When I first read this research, I was deeply committed to the idea that mind-wandering and daydreaming are negative mental behaviors. It took me months to fully accept it as a positive behavior, when harnessed correctly. It was interesting for me to notice this particular chapter—between its first version, when I had just begun my research, and the second, which I wrote after giving mind-wandering a fair try—had transformed and became much more robust and complete. I myself could connect the dots between what I was learning much better.?

All this comes with a caveat. If the daydreaming and mind-wandering is uncontrolled or filled with obsessive, negative thoughts, then it becomes detrimental to daily functioning. Those struggling with attention deficit hyper-activity disorder (ADHD) find it hard to stay focused in their day-to-day tasks. That’s when you are not mind-wandering; the mind is wandering you. The key is to harness this powerful capability of the brain rather than get carried away with it.

For most of us, living grown-up adult lives filled with careers, families, and other worldly responsibilities, the problem is not too much but too little daydreaming and mind-wandering. The key is to be aware of the content of our day- dreams and harvest them for meaningful thoughts and ideas. Everyone has an aspiration, whether it is to make millions of dollars or serve the underprivileged. Mind-wandering can reveal hidden, nonlinear pathways to our goals in a way that no amount of focused work will. It’s the combination of aspirations and free roaming castle building during mind-wandering that ultimately helps us plot and create a future in accordance with, you guessed it, our dreams.?

If you enjoyed this excerpt, share it with your network! I love hearing from my readers, please drop a line if any of this resonates with you. You can also buy the book at?Amazon,?Barnes and Noble?or wherever you buy books online.