Nate Hagens

but it has a cost.

The only place life ever actually occurs, which is here now, this breath, this meal becomes a place you visit only briefly between these simulations.

And the neuroscience here, which I've dove into recently, matters.

And I'm going to start with that because deep within the brains of Homo sapiens lies both the generator and the viable responses to the more than human predicament.

There's a study I recently learned about two psychologists at Harvard sampled the moment to moment experience of thousands of adults, like a quarter million moments via a phone app.

And they ping them at random throughout the day and ask, What are you doing?

What are you thinking about?

And how do you feel?

And what they found was remarkable.

People's minds were wandering.

That is, they were thinking about something other than what they were doing.

47% of waking life, almost half.

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.