Understanding the Default Network

So how come thought predominates so much in our experience?

This is what happens when people sit down to meditate when they're first learning to do that.

Say you give them an instruction,

Pay attention to the breath,

You're with the breath for one breath,

For two breaths and then thinking kicks in and very very rapidly your attention gets captured by a thought and one thought leads to another thought,

Leads to another thought,

Leads to another thought and you're off thinking and then you notice that you're thinking you come back to the breath with the breath for another breath,

Another breath and your attention gets captured by a thought and you're off thinking and thinking and thinking and it's just what minds do.

This is not a mistake,

It's how minds work.

Now what's going on here?

Turns out that what's happening is our brain's default mode network or sometimes just called the default network kicks in over and over and over.

So what is the default network?

Well it's that part of our mind which is chattering away to us all the time when we're not asking it to do anything else.

You know you're walking to the bus stop and it's a lovely day and you're off walking to the bus stop and you're thinking,

Thinking about stuff that happened last week,

You're thinking about stuff that's going to happen in three weeks time,

You're thinking about what you got to do later in the day,

You're thinking about something that somebody said to you recently that's been bothering you,

You're thinking about and you're thinking about and you're thinking about,

You're thinking about your shopping list,

You're thinking about planning a holiday,

You're just thinking and you're beginning to wonder about whether really what did does energy really equal mass multiplied by the speed of light?

What does that mean anyway?

And you're just thinking,

Thinking,

Thinking,

Thinking and we spend a great deal of our time thinking.

Most of the time we're not aware that we're thinking.

Most of the time we're not aware that we're thinking.

It's just going on in the background and it's going on on automatic.

I mean scientists first became aware of this when they were trying to map the parts of the brain that were active at different times under different conditions in order to try and get a sense of which brain regions were used for which functions.

And what they noticed in their experiments is that even when they weren't asking them to do anything in particular,

When they weren't giving people a task,

Their brains remained highly active.

They didn't just quieten down when they weren't actively engaged in a task,

They stayed just as active,

Just as activated.

And gradually they started to notice what was happening and figure it out and what they did is they called this the brain's default mode network,

The default network.

Interestingly I think that many many neuroscientists think that the default network is inevitable,

There's no way around it.

And this is because pretty much every subject that they've stuck in a scanner has had a very active default network and they've rarely looked at the brains of people who have the capacity to turn it down or quieten it.

So that's an aside,

But nonetheless the default network.

Now when the scientists wanted to understand the default network,

What was it all about,

They interviewed people at these times to figure out what was it that you were thinking about when the default mode network was active.

And what they discovered over time was that the default mode network throws up mainly self-referential thoughts.

Most of the time we're thinking about stuff to do with ourselves,

To do with our happiness,

To do with our wants,

To do with our plans,

To do with our self-image,

To do with what people have said about us,

Said to us,

Thought about us,

That we're planning things that are going to augment our sense of ourselves.

We're just thinking about ourselves an awful lot,

Thinking about ourselves an awful lot.

That's what the default network does.

Now this is not a problem,

It's part of the way though in which our sense of ourselves gets to come into being and get reinforced.

There are fragments of narratives running all the time,

Fragments of narratives,

Stories about ourselves,

Who we are in the world,

What we're up to,

What we need,

What we don't like,

What we like,

What we want to do,

What we don't want to do,

Where we've been,

Where we're going,

What happened X many months ago,

What's gonna happen in two years time,

Stuff.

Over and over and over again we're rehearsing the story of our lives,

Telling ourselves who we are,

What we're up to,

We're creating and recreating and recreating our sense of ourselves,

Temporary sense of ourselves.

It's temporary because our sense of ourselves is always changing and it's highly contextual.

We're different selves in different situations.

You might notice for example that as an adult,

When you meet with your siblings as an adult,

One kind of self comes into being,

The self that you are with your siblings or the self that you are with your mum and dad.

When you're with your friends,

Another self comes into being,

The self that you are with your friends,

With your mates.

When you're with your partner,

Another self comes into being,

The self that you are with your partner.

When you're with colleagues at work,

Yet another self comes into being,

The way of being with these people.

So our sense of ourselves is always changing and we're constantly reinforcing it and telling ourselves the story of the self we now have.

In fragments,

In bits,

It's not a continuous woven narrative,

It's very very fragmentary but it kind of works.

It creates a sense of ourselves and that's what the default mode network is up to.

So that's one of the ways in which our sense of ourselves as agents in the world comes into being.

There are other factors that play into this as well.

There's sensory factors that play into it.

We get this sense that because our senses appear to be converging on a single point,

That that point upon which they converge is a self and we almost imagine that there's a kind of little person in there somewhere,

Ourselves,

Observing all this stuff,

Observing the sights,

The sounds,

The smells etc etc and that's who we actually are,

That little person inside our minds looking out through our eyes and hearing out through our ears as if.

It's a funny old idea when you think about it.

There's not just the five senses that are playing into this,

We have many many more senses than these.

There's the sense of proprioception for example which is the sense of the location of our limbs in space,

The sense of the location of our body in space.

There's interoception,

The sense of hunger for example,

The feeling of hunger or the desire for sex,

That feeling of that urge that's produced by a sense we call interoception,

Our interior sense of ourselves,

Our interior sensing mechanism in the moment.

We have kineseption which is our feeling of ourselves moving in space and that's produced by a whole bunch of receptors all down the musculoskeletal system which change as we orient differently in space.

So we have all these different receptors sending data to our brains and our brains are trying to make sense of what this all is.

Now our brains don't process an ever-changing picture of ourselves in the world,

Rather what they do,

Encased in this sort of bony skull which doesn't see and doesn't hear and doesn't smell,

Doesn't taste,

Doesn't have any immediate senses of its own,

It receives electrical signals and chemical signals and it tries to figure out what these mean.

That's all the brain's doing all the time,

It's receiving data from the outside world and trying to process that data to guess,

To figure out what's happening out there and the way it does that is it looks for change,

It's constantly monitoring change,

It doesn't want to waste energy with something that's not moving,

It's like this,

You know,

I'm now in this room and it's pretty static,

If the door opens my attention will go to that movement and I will try to make sense of what's happening,

Is a net coming into the room,

What's changing,

I'll make sense of it then and one of the ways in which we make sense of what's coming at us is by way of predicting what it ought to be,

What makes sense,

So gosh I'm giving you a lot of data but think about this,

It's dusk and I'm walking along the street in Cambridge and I see a four-legged yellowish creature walking towards me,

I can't quite see it,

I can't quite focus on it but I don't think it's a mountain lion,

I don't think it's a cougar,

I'm more than likely to think it's a yellow Labrador because I'm expecting yellow Labradors,

I have a prior expectation that it will be a yellow Labrador and so a yellow Labrador indeed appears,

Now if it were a mountain lion or a cougar I would be terribly startled but by and large I'm not and my brain doesn't want to waste energy trying to figure out that thing,

Is it a mountain lion,

Is it a yellow,

Is it a cougar,

No just a yellow Labrador expected,

Off we go,

What's happening here and this is kind of important is that we have a moment of apperception,

Apperception is what happens when we fit new data into a body of existing data,

We fit new knowledge into a body of existing knowledge in order to make sense of it yeah so we have some sense impressions coming in through the eyes and the brain goes on yellow Labrador,

It's aperceived them fits it into the body of prior experience,

Everything's cool,

Now interestingly this also happens with interoception,

One of the ways in which our emotional life unfolds,

In which emotions are built,

We have a feeling,

A sense in our bodies,

We have some kind of something going on in our bodies,

We aperceive that as some kind of interesting experience and we begin to frame it in a way that makes sense to us,

We frame it in a way that makes sense to us in the light of previous expectations,

There's a lovely story about this from a woman who studied how emotions are made and she described how once she went on a date with someone and suddenly got the feeling,

God I think I'm falling in love here,

This person,

This guy must be really something,

I mean just one date and suddenly all these things are kicking off and whoo that's amazing,

Must be Wow and discovered the next day that she'd got flu,

So the symptoms of flu had presented themselves as if they were the symptoms of falling in love and she started to experience,

Aperceived all these sort of loving feelings coming up and she started to speak to herself as if she was falling in love and her default network started to turn over thoughts about love and her feelings started to be connected with feelings of being in love,

So this is how our minds work,

We're constantly building the story of our experience out of little fragments of this,

Little fragments of that,

Telling ourselves the story of our lives over and over and over again and in that process we're building and rebuilding and rebuilding a sense of self,

Now that sense of self is neither real nor not real,

It's just what happens,

It's just what happens,

To speak of it as unreal is in some ways to deny what's actually happening,

This is what we're doing,

We're creating a narrative,

To speak of it as real is to miss the fact that it is just a narrative,

It's just a story,

It's just a story we're telling ourselves about ourselves over and over and over again,

Now when the default network calms down we have a very different kind of experience,

We stop doing that and there's an interesting question about whether when we simply stop doing that,

That is what awakening is all about,

Is awakening simply the calming of the default network?

I don't think it is,

I think there has to be something else in the picture and that something elseness for awakening to take place I believe is a sense of interdependence,

A sense of conditionality,

An understanding of the way in which conditionality is generating and regenerating and regenerating this wonderful experience we call life,

The living universe,

To sense that,

To feel that,

To experience into that is very very very different from just sitting with a quiet mind,

Sitting with a quiet mind is wonderful,

It's a great experience and to be recommended,

It's very refreshing but it's not the same as awakening,

Awakening has to have another component to it,

A component of insight into the way things really are,

An insight into the nature of reality and an emotional engagement with that,

A feeling for the wonder of life,

Feelings of love,

Feelings of awe,

Feelings of delight along with quiet and default mode network and a sense of understanding that this is how things actually are,

Here we are,

This is it,

For that all to come together then we have awakening I believe,

At least at a moderate level