Nate Hagens

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.

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.