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What Does Brain Do At "Rest"?
When given nothing else to do, the brain defaults to thinking about the person it’s embedded in. The brain areas related to processing emotions, recalling memory, and thinking about what’s to come become quietly active.
This is “the default mode of brain function,” and the constellation of brain areas that carry it out are the default mode network, or DMN.
People who daydream more tend to have a more active DMN; relatedly, dreaming itself appears to be an amplified version of mind-wandering.
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Mental Chatter Is Not Real
In cognitive behavioral therapy, that process of divesting realness from your mental chatter is called “
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What Does Buddhism Say?
In Buddhist traditions, this chattering described by neuroscientists as the default mode is a dragon to be tamed, if not slain. The crux of the Buddhist argument is that if you don’t establish some relationship with your DMN, some mindfulness of its activity, you’ll be yanked around by t...
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What Does The Science Say?
The default mode has a "prospective bias". Depending on the person, their history, and their biological dispositions, that prospection could tilt toward worrying or
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DMN's Contribution In Creative Thinking
The wandering nature of the DMN can be harnessed for creative thinking. In a 2015 study, participants were asked to do creative thinking tasks. Results showed that creative thinking requires a combination of focusing internal attention and controlling spontaneous thinking. It underscores the fact...
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Cognitive Flexibility
The trouble that your DMS gets into seems to depend on how automatic your patterns of thought are. The key is cognitive flexibility: being able to more freely choose your mental habits, and have greater agency in your cognitive phenomena. CBT and even
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"Meditation practice is necessary generally because our thinking pattern, our conceptualized way of conducting our life in the world, is either too manipulative, imposing itself upon the world, or else runs completely wild and uncontrolled. Therefore, our meditation practice must begin wi...
CHÖGYAM TRUNGPA
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DMN And the Image of the Self
Suffering arises when people concretize the fleeting swirls of thought, especially around conceptions of self. Default-mode content involves an image of self, one that’s easy to become attached to. These self conceptions carry lots of emotional weight. We think that the image of the self...
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The First-Night Effect: The Reason We Can’t Sleep At A New Place
- Known as the First-Night Effect, many of us aren’t able to sleep properly at a new place the first time.
- The reason for this, according to research, is that half our brain (the left hemisphere, mostly) stays awake in alert mode. This area of the brain is called the defau...
Focus And The Brain
When we’re consciously doing things we’re using the “executive attention network, ” the parts of the brain that control and inhibit our attention. The attention network makes it possible for us to relate directly to the world presently around us.
By contrast, when our minds wander...
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