Nate Hagens

So we should not think of this as a bug in our physiology.

The problem is the chronic dominance of this network in people alive today, at least in the global West and North.

Most of the time in healthy mental life, attention flows fluidly back and forth between the DMN and another system called the TPN, the task positive network, the brain in attentive contact with what is in front of it.

And these two systems are, um,

Anti-correlated.

When one is up, the other is down.

And you leave the present in order to plan, but then you come back.

You drift into your memories, and then you return.

That's the design.

But what modern conditions do, the iPhone, the news cycle, the attention economy, and for those who have taken on the more than human predicament in the Metacrisis, the weight of what we've come to understand, this all tipped the balance heavily towards the default mode network and keeps it there.

So science now tells us that chronic DMN dominance has predictable and measurable consequences.

Reduced gray matter in the hippocampus over time, increased rates of depression and anxiety, diminished sensory processing.

The world literally looks duller and feels less present because the network that processes the present

is being outcompeted by the network that processes the future and the past.

What this looks like in daily life to many of you is probably familiar.

You drive your usual route to the store and you arrive with no memory of your drive.

because your task positive system handled the driving on autopilot while the default mode network ran whatever movie it was running.

Most people probably experience this several times a day.

You read a page in a book, and at the end of the page, you know you read the words, but none of their meaning registered because your mind was elsewhere.

I've been doing this for decades.