#default mode network

As someone whose mind is constantly jumping between memories, worries, ideas and observations... My brain seems permanently committed to keeping at least ten tabs open at once😭, I'm always thinking and thinking - either nostalgic about my past, anxious about my future , or so caught up in my thoughts that I feel like I barely experience the present moment while its happening. And, not living in the present can of course contribute to higher anxiety levels, emotional burnout and fatigue.

So I guess the first step to living more mindfully would be to understand why it is biologically so difficult for us to do so...

Basically, your brain has a system called the default mode network. When you are not focused on a specific task, your brain doesn't go quiet... it activates this network and immediately starts doing what it does best : replaying past events, simulating future scenarios, running social comparisons, imagining things that haven't happened yet. It is your brain's literal default state.

AANDD... It was a huge evolutionary advantage.

The ancestors whose brains constantly rehearsed past mistakes, anticipated future threats and mentally prepared for what came next... they survived. In a world without medicine, without infrastructure, without any safety net whatsoever- replaying the moment you trusted the wrong person, mentally preparing for a predator that might return, or pre-running a difficult social interaction before it happened wasn't rumination. It was critical. Get the social dynamics of your group wrong and you risked exclusion. Miss an environmental threat you'd already encountered once and you might not survive it twice. Fail to anticipate what came next and you were always reacting too late. The ones who simply existed in the present, unbothered and unplanning, often didn't make it. Your brain was never built to rest in the now. It was built to stay one step ahead of what the now might become.

So when you try to just be... no planning, no replaying, no spiralling ; you are fighting hundreds of thousands of years of survival programming. The present moment, evolutionarily, was never really the point ! You are not overthinking because something is wrong with you. You are overthinking because your brain is doing exactly what it evolved to do.

==

This is really fascinating stuff, and it provides a biological basis for why society should be empathetic towards people with gender dysphoria. They're not just "crazy," they have a clinically recognizable neurological condition.

Question: how does someone "self ID" their own intrinsic network connectivity in their parietal-occipital and fronto-parietal networks? And why are we still entertaining this trans "self ID" crap as an "identity"?

When you’re sitting in a waiting room or unwinding after dinner, if you’re not reading, watching television, or on your phone, your default mode network is projecting the future and sorting out the past. It’s processing your life. It activates when we daydream, during certain kinds of meditation, and when we lie in bed before going to sleep. This is the system for self-reflection, and reflection about others, the area of the brain that is highly active when we are not focused on a task. It is the part of us that goes ‘off-line.’ A healthy default mode network is necessary for the human brain rejuvenate, store information in more permanent locations, gain perspective, process complicated ideas, and be truly creative. It has also been linked in young people to the development of a strong sense of identity and a capacity for empathy. Not surprisingly, stress impairs the default mode’s network’s ability to work its magic. Scientists are concerned that because of technology’s ubiquity, young people have too few opportunities to activate their default network and, as a result, too few opportunities for self-reflection.“

Researchers Discover Where Earliest Signs of Alzheimer's Occur in the Brain

Researchers at Lund University in Sweden have for the first time convincingly shown where in the brain the earliest signs of Alzheimer's occur. The discovery could potentially become significant to future Alzheimer's research while contributing to improved diagnostics.

Alan Watts once said that “when you get the message hang up the phone”. 

I believe this is wrong. 

To say to hang up the phone when the message is understood is to misunderstand understanding. The mushroom is not an answering machine. Their is an essential knowledge but beyond this their is infinitely more to learn. The mushroom is a telephone wire to nature. We are intelligent, and therefore this must mean the environment from which we emerge is also intelligent. Nature is the source of our intelligence, in whatever capacity we exercise it. The implication in Alan's statement is that there is no more to be learned, and that's why you hang up the phone. But you might agree that it can never be true that one has achieved mastery over every possible thing to be learned. Therefore it is not a good idea to hang up the phone. Unless time for integration is required of course. 

So the mushroom is not to be seen as a one time experience that you have. The mushroom is to be seen as our forgotten symbiotic partner in the ancient world before anything identifiable as humanness was evident on this planet. Without the mushroom 'you' are not. Don't hang up the phone. Instead seek to spend as much timeless time as you can with this most strange and humble creature that may have origins in a time and place that transcends the contemplative power of the human imagination. Why? Because the mushroom is the source of the human imagination. The mushroom is the architect of our thought. It extends the boundaries of what it is possible to think, of what ‘can’ be thought. 

When you take the mushroom, the mushroom takes you. It teaches by virtue of the content of your own mind. It rearranges this content into a narrative that you can understand. That is the ‘message’ that appears before you although it seems so obviously to arrive from somewhere outside you. And having understood you are amazed that you didn’t see what you now see before! The knowledge was always there, deep in your mind, in different regions of the brain, never brought together in this specific unique way to create a new coherent picture on the way reality is put together. So is the mushroom a tool to open us up to the dimensions of the ultimate reality that are normally hidden for their irrelevance to the human virtual reality? But who defines these boundaries of the human experience? What do we mean by human anyway? I am nothing, nothing at all. Absolutely nothing to say. 

Brain Network That Helps Babies Learn to Walk Identified