The default mode has a "prospective bias". Depending on the person, their history, and their biological dispositions, that prospection could tilt toward <a href="https://www.thecut.com/2016/11/how-to-deal-with-negative-emotions.html">worrying </a>or <a href="https://www.thecut.com/2016/12/is-hope-good-for-you.html">hoping</a>. There are 3 different types of day dreaming: <ol><li>Positive constructive daydreaming: lots of playful, wishful imagery and plan-making thoughts.</li><li>Dysphoric daydreaming: lots of anguish and obsessive fantasies. </li><li>Poor attentional control: hard to concentrate on anything</li></ol>Research indicates that <a href="http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/1568957">a disturbed DMN</a> is a mechanism in <a href="http://reliawire.com/depressive-rumination-default-mode-network/">depression</a>. Our greatest source of suffering isn’t the default mode but when we get stuck in the default mode.

What Does The Science 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 the swirling eddies of emotion, reaction, and rumination.

What Does Buddhism Say?

"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 with ego’s outermost layer, the discursive thoughts which continually run through our minds, our mental gossip."

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 “<a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/98/2/676.abstract">the default mode of brain function</a>,” 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.

What Does Brain Do At "Rest"?

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 is something real and not just an mental image. However, the self isn’t one thing, it’s an evolving construct of many different processes.  According to Buddhist traditions, when we take it to be real when it isn’t then that causes suffering.

DMN And the Image of the Self 

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 <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.03553">hypnosis</a> could tame an unruly DMN.Meditation also <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811917300502?np=y">reduces activity</a> in the DMN. It reforms the DMN so that the resting state becomes more like the meditative state, producing “a more present-centred default mode.” By investing more attention in the sensory world than in your narrative overlaying it, you might identify the former to be what’s true.

Cognitive Flexibility 

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 that not all minds that wander are lost.

DMN's Contribution In Creative Thinking

In <a href="https://www.thecut.com/2016/11/how-to-deal-with-negative-emotions.html">cognitive behavioral therapy</a>, that process of divesting realness from your mental chatter is called “<a href="https://bmcpsychology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40359-016-0115-6">decentering</a>,” or thinking less that your thoughts are the truth about what’s happening and viewing them as an observer. The <a href="https://www.thecut.com/2017/01/yoga-lsd-meditation-ego-dissolution.html">therapeutic interventions offered</a> by psychedelics like psilocybin and LSD — which, at least in one trial, helped longtime smokers quit at a rate three times that of the best pharma drugs — seem to have a similar, though more sudden, effect.

Mental Chatter Is Not Real

Mental meanderings are “the baseline state of you as a cognitive system” — is that a good thing?

CHÖGYAM TRUNGPA