Nate Hagens

And, cal surprise, people were less happy when their minds were wandering than when their minds were not, regardless of the task.

Even unpleasant tasks were experienced as more satisfying when they were fully attended to than pleasant tasks done with a wandering mind.

They titled this paper, A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind, unusually direct for a peer-reviewed paper.

We'll put it in the show notes.

And in a related study, I think over 30 years ago now, research noticed there was a set of brain regions

that consistently deactivated whenever subjects engaged in a task and then reactivated the moment the task ended.

And they eventually published this canonical paper proposing the existence of what came to be known as the default mode network, DMN for short, because it described what the brain defaults to when not externally engaged.

So in the years since, the default mode network has become one of the most studied structures in neuroscience, and we've only covered it once on this platform, in my recollection, in Taylor Guthrie's episode, which you should check out.

The DMN is a network of brain regions, including parts of the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus, that fire together

in synchrony and that activate the moment that you stop engaging in a task.

So what does this network do?

It does self-referential processing, thinking about yourself, your traits.

your history, your situation, what others think about you.

It also does theory of mind, modeling other people's mental states, imagining what someone is thinking, what they intended, how they will react if you say something.

And it does spontaneous thought, the wandering associative, image-laden flow that occurs when attention is not pinned to a specific task.

And it does mental time travel, remembering the past

and simulating the future.

It turns out the hippocampus, which stores our memories, is the same structure used to construct hypothetical futures.

People who have damage to their hippocampus actually cannot imagine future scenarios.

I cannot imagine that.