Nate Hagens

Other examples, you take a shower.

And you emerge realizing that you have been thinking the whole time.

The shower is famous as a creativity zone precisely because it's a sensory environment so familiar that it requires no attentional resources which frees up your default mode network to roam.

This is why insights come in the shower or in my case on my bike routes.

You have a conversation in which you are actually rehearsing your reply rather than listening.

This is the default mode network running a social simulation, what you will say, how it will land.

And the actual person across from you is reduced to a stimulus, not a human being.

For many, time appears to accelerate as we age.

This is partly DMN related.

Children spend much more of their day in task positive, sensory immediate processing.

Everything is new.

Everything demands their attention.

But as we age and our routines automate,

A larger percentage of our day, almost by definition, runs on the default mode network, which compresses subjective time because the DMN does not lay down super rich memories the way that novel sensory engagement does.

So the years feel short, partly because we're not actually present for most of them.

Okay, so how does this apply to our lives and especially apply to viewers of this platform?

Well, several specific features of Metacrisis Awareness make default mode network capture worse and more powerful than for the average modern human.

First, thinking about the future through this lens has an emotional component.

Our thoughts are often loaded with grief and fear and anger and sometimes moral outrage, and the DMN preferentially processes what matters most.

The very importance of what we understand is what makes it so colonizing of our mental lives.