03 Our Body's Kryptonite: The Default Mode Network
Normally, this column focuses on the myriad amazing connections between the body, mind, and brain. This week, I’d like to explore the relationship between a particular mind (and brain) state that can counter body intelligence. Let’s look more closely at this state, and at its implications for emotional health and happiness.
The brain’s prefrontal cortex is two million years old, which is relatively young in evolutionary terms. Sometimes referred to as your brain’s control center, the prefrontal cortex oversees complex planning and decision making. It enables you to anticipate the consequences of your actions, and to set and achieve goals. It helps you reflect on and learn from past experience. It underwrites self-control and with it, social and moral behavior. This piece of neural terrain has evolved in size and complexity, and distinguishes us from many primates and mammals.
But the evolutionary advantages it gives us may come with hidden costs.
And right along the midline of the prefrontal cortex lies a cluster of areas known as the default mode network, which you can also think of as your brain’s “hidden cost center.”
The default mode network becomes active when the brain (and by extension, the mind) is not focused on a task. Scientists also refer to it as “mind wandering”—and it has a positive side, which I’ll come back to.
When the default mode network activates, it tends to do the following:
It focuses on evaluating the present: how you feel or think about what’s happening right now, and how you’d like it to be different. (Notice the contrast to simply being present.)
It projects into the future and imagines things that haven’t happened yet, often in vivid detail. (If you’ve ever rehearsed a conversation prior to having it, you’ll know how compelling this can be—and it is a defining feature of anxiety.)
It also ruminates on the past and how you wish it were different. Sometimes, you even modify past events in your mind and evaluate the new, imagined outcome, a phenomenon referred to as counterfactual processing. (The fantasy can be more addictive than the reality.)
The default mode interprets events and interactions as being all about your favorite subject: you. Its egocentricity can become negative self-reference, the domain of your harsh inner critic. (Imagine thoughts like I’m just unlovable, or I’m such a loser.) Negative self-reference is strongly associated with depression, so much so that the strength and frequency of its activity can be used to predict a depressive episode, even after you’ve recovered from it.
The default state develops powerful narratives about your direct experiences in the moment or in your body. It then layers meanings on top. It can take you, for example, from I feel bad to No one will ever love me again or The world is an unsafe place.
As you might imagine, it’s also adept at judging ideas, experiences, and other people as “other,” a characteristic of implicit bias and prejudice.
This avalanche of thoughts is known in Buddhist philosophy as papanca. My teacher and friend, Sebene Selassie, describes papanca in her wonderful book You Belong as mental proliferation which spreads like wildfire. As for the more universal contents of the default mode, Sebene quotes Krishnamurti, who says of papanca, “You’re not thinking your thoughts; you’re thinking the culture’s thoughts.”
Your Default State Is An Inflammatory State
The default mode doesn’t just affect your mind and brain; it changes your body. When activated, the default mode launches a neurobiological response. (This happens in much the same way as the immune system ignites an inflammatory response to a virus, bacteria, fungi, or other foreign pathogen.) This prompts a cascade of events in the body that includes inflammation in multiple synced areas, including the immune system, autonomic nervous system, connective tissue matrix, and enteric nervous system. The converse is also true: Inflammation in any of these systems can trigger an acceleration of default mode network activity. Have you ever noticed, for example, that an inflammatory reaction to food or sudden shift in digestion affects how and what you think, and also influences your mood, stress levels, and interpersonal skills?
Let me point out, as always, that mind wandering is not intrinsically bad. In fact, it also lies at the root of creativity, inspiration, and innovation—when we can direct it. But research shows repeatedly that when it hijacks our minds, brains, and bodies, it promotes a state of unhappiness.
A Wandering Mind Is An Unhappy Mind
You may be wondering, “Yeah, but what if the default mode state doesn’t actually cause inflammation, suffering, and unhappiness, but results from them instead?
Two researchers, Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert, set out to answer this question. They surveyed 2,250 adults with a mean age of 34. Using an iPhone app, they interrupted participants several times daily to inquire about their thoughts, feelings, and actions at the time they were “pinged.” They asked, How are you feeling right now?, What are you doing right now?, and Are you thinking about something other than what you’re currently doing?
Nearly 47% of the time, it turned out, people were thinking about something other than what they were actually doing. In other words, they weren’t immersed in present-moment awareness—and didn’t know that they weren’t until asked.
Killingsworth and Gilbert found that people’s minds often wandered to pleasant activities, something we might think of as helpful—the “power of positive thinking.”
Yet a positive focus in mind-wandering had no beneficial effect on participants’ mood or well-being.
people were less happy when their minds wandered than when they focused. This was true for all activities, regardless of their nature. Mind wandering, the researchers noted, was the cause and not the result of unhappiness.
The researchers concluded,
“The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost.”
Social Context
As you might imagine, the “discovery” of the default mode network in 2001 launched a great deal of excitement and a cascade of scientific papers. But the same discovery was well-documented by sages, spiritual seekers, and writers, often millennia earlier.
Buddhist Philosophy + the Default Mode
There is a well-loved parable about the Buddha and the second arrow of suffering. The Buddha asked a student, “If someone shoots you with an arrow, is it painful?” Yes, answered the student dutifully. “And if you get hit by a second arrow in the same place,” the Buddha continued, “is it even more painful?” (The answer, again, was yes—much more so, in fact.)
The first arrow symbolizes the unavoidable hardships of life. Its pain is the raw kind we feel in response to “shit that happens.” (To be clear, these last few words are mine, not the Buddha’s.) The second arrow is represents the proliferation our minds create in response to the pain of direct experience, which compounds the pain and turns it into suffering.
The first arrow is the one life shoots at us. The second arrow is the one we shoot at ourselves—and, by extension, the only one over which we have a degree of control. This is where the notion that pain is inevitable, while suffering is optional comes from. The parable also points to why mindfulness (and, we can add, of the body) is so beneficial.
Yogic Philosophy + the Default Mode
Yoga philosophy also speaks to this. The cause of suffering begins when the mind begins to identify with the objects of the mind.
Sutra 2.5 in particular reads,
Anitya asuci duhkha anatmasu nitya suci sukha atma khyatih avidya.
Translated, that means avidya (non-seeing, or ignorance) occurs when we mistake the transient for the permanent, the impure for the pure, pain for pleasure, and what is not the self for the self. Avidya is also described as a conflation of the seer (the subject of experience) with the what is seen (the object of experience). The mental proliferations are not self, and identifying with them is a cause of suffering.
One of the amazing things about interoception and other nodes of embodiment is that they allow us to alternate between the seer and the seen, and in time, to differentiate the abiding of the seer (our true nature) with the fluctuations of consciousness (not-self, or what we see or experience in any given moment).
Brilliant Writers and the Default Mode
One of my favorite writers, the late David Foster Wallace, also pegged the destructive nature of the default mode perfectly. In This is Water, the published transcript of his graduation speech at Kenyon College, he said,
“Please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being “well-adjusted”, which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.
As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head. Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”
David Foster Wallace wrote this in 2005. I don’t believe he’d read the early neuroscience on the default mode network; he was just tapped in to the way it worked and had long reflected on his own struggles with it. (Sadly, he took his own life in 2008. Also, it broke my heart to read about his harassment of Mary Karr.)
All this to say: It’s important to acknowledge that modern science is studying a default state of the mind and brain that, however cool, has been known about and studied for thousands of years.
Unconscious Coupling
Ideally, we’d be able to immerse ourselves in sensory awareness at will—or for that matter, allow our minds to wander in creative, not destructive, ways. But that’s not the norm for most of us. Sometimes our thoughts get “stuck” to our feelings: We can’t simply be present with a sensation without thinking about, judging, or narrating it. In other words, sensory experience activates the default mode network. You can think of the two neural states (interoception and default mode) as being coupled when they shouldn’t be. And this happens to excess In anxiety, depression, chronic pain, addictions, and other emotionally-mediated issues.
In my last column, I mentioned that the scientific definition of interoception is to receive, interpret, respond to, and regulate sensations that come from the body.
Rather, as soon as a sensation arises, the default mode attaches a story or meaning to it. The mind interprets it in catastrophic ways, judge ourselves or our bodies for having it, or overregulate (read: suppress or change) the sensation as soon as we have it. But the coupling of sensation with default mode means that thoughts infiltrate the receiving, interpreting, responding to, and regulating of sensations. This makes it hard to rest in pure sensation or in the moment.
The instructions given in mindfulness practices like MBSR, to experience sensations and emotions as passing states of awareness, begin, over time, to “uncouple” sensation from evaluation. This is yet another reason why mindfulness and interoception are highly effective for anxiety, depression, chronic pain, addictions, and even gut disorders. But there’s another reason why.
So what happens when we meditate or interocept regularly, over long periods of time? One seminal study of long-term meditators found that their brains different from the rest of us in key ways. In their brains, the networks that pay attention co-activated with the default mode. (It’s the good kind of coupling.)
This means that meditators could recognize that they were in the default state. And they were better able to disengage from that state and return to present-moment awareness. Remarkably, these benefits also extended to states in which they were not meditating—in other words, even when they were doing something other than meditating. This productive coupling of paying attention with the default mode adds to the benefit of mindfulness, particularly mindfulness of body.
These results hint at what we can do to uncouple direct experience from the default mode.
How to Gain Autonomy over What and How You Think
One of the most important insights that research on the default mode network offers (there are now several thousand studies and counting) is the insight that we can’t “manage” the mind’s default state using the mind (i.e. logical reasoning) itself. Or, as we’ve seen, through positive thinking. (This is why it’s hard to treat intransigent default mode patterns by talking to a friend, reasoning with ourselves, or verbal processing.)
The three most effective ways to quiet our inner critic are: mindfulness practices, including self-compassion and loving kindness meditation; embodiment, including interoception and movement; and immersion in states of creative flow (think art, music, dance, gardening, and so much more).
Restorative Yoga
in the most intense phase of default mode wildfire, it can be helpful to move, or to use connective tissue self-bodywork to open a channel for releasing the activation.
At the same time, I admit: When it comes to the default mode, I’m partial to dynamic rest, particularly through restorative yoga practices. They work over time, in a cumulative way, to decouple sensation from default mode activation. They also allow space for the inner critic to siphon off some of its acidity.
The pose below combines restorative yoga with an embodied self-compassion practice.
Once you’ve gotten the building of the pose down pat, you can try the audio version of this practice, which uses Supported Relaxation Pose. (Feel free to use Supported Relaxation, which includes a bolster under your knees, instead of blocks and towels under your thighs.)
New to Bodies of Knowledge? Try these columns:
The Body’s Role in Emotional Balance
Interoception, Your Body’s Superpower
What Embodiment Is and Why It Matters
Sources:
Negative self-reference is strongly associated with depression, so much so that the strength: LeMoult, J., Kircanski, K., Prasad, G., & Gotlib, I. H. (2017). Negative Self-Referential Processing Predicts the Recurrence of Major Depressive Episodes. Clinical psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, 5(1), 174–181. https://doi.org/10.1177/2167702616654898
Two researchers, Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert, set out to answer: Killingsworth, M. A., & Gilbert, D. T. (2010). A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science (New York, N.Y.), 330(6006), 932. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.119243
In one foundational study, long-term meditators showed that brain networks: Hasenkamp, W., & Barsalou, L. W. (2012). Effects of meditation experience on functional connectivity of distributed brain networks. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 6, 38. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2012.00038
Sebene Selassie, describes papanca in her wonderful book You Belong as: Selassie, Sebene. (2021). You Belong: A Call for Connection. Harper San Francisco.
Translated, that means avidya (non-seeing, or ignorance) occurs when we mistake the transient for the permanent: Iyengar, B. K. S. (2002). Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (New edition). Thorsons.