Nate Hagens

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.

And only since researching this did I understand what's actually happening.

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.