Nate Hagens

To imagine tomorrow you were using the same equipment with which you remember the past, which I thought was pretty interesting.

Mental time travel like this is probably one of the great cognitive achievements of our species.

It's how we plan harvest and anticipate the winter and prepare for childbirth and build cathedrals and monuments and move towards regenerative futures as planetary stewards, perhaps.

Self-narrative is what gives life its coherence and theory of mind is also...

the foundation of human cooperation.

So the default mode network here is the center of what makes us peculiarly human.

So viewed from that vantage, the capacity to leave the present moment is a superpower for us as individuals and for our species.

We need the default mode network in our daily lives.

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.