10% Happier with Dan Harris
How To Escape Your Brain's Default Mode Network | Zindel Segal and Norman Farb
20 Apr 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the default mode network and why is it important?
This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, my fellow suffering beings. How we doing today? So much human suffering is caused by the fact that we are stuck in our heads, captured by our thoughts, suckered by our habitual rumination and ancient storylines.
So today we're going to talk about the science of getting out of your head, of escaping the brain's default mode network, which my guests today refer to as the house of habit. We of course need our default mode network, our capacity to behave habitually. We need it in order to survive and in order to brush our teeth and tie our shoes without undue cognitive demands.
But if you are stuck in the default mode, you're missing out on quite a bit. And you're also susceptible to many, many flavors of unhappiness. My guests today are Dr. Zindel Siegel and Professor Norman Farb. Together, they wrote a book called Better in Every Sense.
In it, they describe something they call sense foraging, which is a simple but powerful practice where you use your senses to turn down the more noxious aspects of the aforementioned default mode network.
In this conversation, we talk about what sense foraging is exactly and how it can help you go from languishing to flourishing, how shutting down your senses makes you more vulnerable to depression, the difference between sense foraging and mindfulness, why, and this is counterintuitive, but why most of us could use a little bit more chaos in our lives.
how radical acceptance can be a great starting point for sense foraging, and the nine simple rules for sense foraging.
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Chapter 2: How can sense foraging help break habitual thinking?
A little bit more about our guests before we dive in here. Dr. Zindel Siegel is a distinguished professor of psychology in mood disorders at the University of Toronto Scarborough, and he's also a co-founder of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy.
Professor Norman Farb, PhD, is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, Mississauga, where he directs the Regulatory and Effective Dynamics Laboratory. Two things to say before we jump in. First, this episode first aired back in June 2024, but we pulled it out of the archives because it's awesome.
Second, if you are interested in meditation, I would love for you to check out my new meditation app. It's called 10% with Dan Harris. As you know, I had a meditation app for many years, and then I went through a painful separation from that app. So I've now got this new thing, which I'm really excited about. Many of the same teachers from the old app are on the new app.
People like Joseph Goldstein, Seben A. Selassie, Jeff Warren, and many more. What's different about this app is not only do we have amazing guided meditations from all those teachers, but we also are leaning into community. There's a ton of evidence that one of the best ways to support your practice is to do it in the carpool lane.
So we have built in features that allow you to connect with me, the teachers, my team and one another. crucially with one another.
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Chapter 3: What is the difference between sense foraging and mindfulness?
We also do weekly live events with guided meditations and questions and answers and et cetera, et cetera. Head on over to danharris.com to get the app and join the party. The first two weeks are free. And if you cannot afford it, just let us know and we will hook you up.
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Chapter 4: How does languishing differ from flourishing?
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Dr. Zendel Siegel and Professor Norm Farb, welcome to the show. Thanks for having us. Pleasure to have you. Zendel, let me start with you since you've been on the show before. Can you give me the origin story of how your friendship with Norm came about and how it led to this book?
Sure. A lot of my interest in working with mindfulness meditation to help people dealing with depression found its way into neuroimaging because at that time there was a compelling story of antidepressants changing the brain. and serotonin deficiencies being a kind of ironclad argument for antidepressants.
And the idea that somehow meditation could also help people was bolstered by the fact that the neuroimaging findings showed that people who practiced mindfulness, people who practiced meditation, also had changes in brain regions that were important in affect emotion regulation.
I didn't have the expertise to conduct those kinds of studies, but I was able to connect with a colleague at the University of Toronto. Adam Anderson and his star graduate student happened to be Norman Farb.
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Chapter 5: What role does radical acceptance play in sense foraging?
I think his star graduate student went to work for Apple, but I was like the backup star graduate student.
His less well-compensated graduate student is now your co-author. Got it. But maybe more psychologically stable.
Well, it remains to be seen. A lot of that deep psychopathology emerges late in life, so playing the long game.
So, Norm, now that we're picking on you a little bit, what's your version of the story? How did this come about?
Yeah, so I would say, like you, Dan, I was not a meditation guy at all. I really wanted to learn neuroimaging. I'd done like psychophysiology, like how the body responds to emotions for a master's degree. And functional neuroimaging or fMRI is really expensive.
And I knew that Adam, my supervisor, had something cooking where he had a funded fMRI study and I wanted to do neuroimaging and emotions for my PhD. And I was already the guy in the lab who did yoga, like on the weekends.
So, you know, it was mostly initially, I would say, like a marriage of convenience where there's going to be this big imaging opportunity is going to be something kind of new and out there, which appealed to me.
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Chapter 6: What are the nine simple rules for sense foraging?
And it was kind of scary meeting Zindel at the start. He's like a distinguished professor at the biggest like mental health institution, Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto. And quite a big power imbalance, I think, when we first met, like a first or second year PhD student. So at the start, I was just like the person grinding the scans and getting the analysis going.
I think over the course of then starting to try to write grants together and just like, I don't know, thousands of meetings. I think I heard you swear for the first time, maybe five years into our relationship. And I was like, oh, I'm getting somewhere with this guy.
Yeah.
And then Adam ended up leaving to Cornell. I ended up getting hired to stay on in Toronto as a professor. And so now we're a bit more equalized in our roles. We continue to meet and trade off clinical and neuroimaging expertise as we write papers. So it was really an organic relationship. And I did start to sip and eventually bathe in the Kool-Aid of meditation over the two decades as well.
So we kind of grew together.
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Chapter 7: How can we toggle between automaticity and receptivity?
Well, let's start with a foundational idea for this book you've written. What is the default mode network?
Yeah, I'll take that one. It's kind of a brain-oriented one. The default mode network is a constellation or group of brain regions that are activated when you let someone ostensibly relax in the scanner. So they're doing arithmetic or some kind of mental rotation or memory task. And you say, hey, just for a couple of minutes, just relax. You don't have to do anything at all.
And then all of these brain regions, especially in the midline of the brain, and then a couple little horns above the ears light up when you tell the person they have nothing to do. And so this led to this characterization that this is what the brain does by default when you're not up to anything in particular and ostensibly
because it does show up in earlier mammals and other species, this was originally a network that kind of takes care of the interior state of the body. But more and more, we started to recognize that the default network can be activated intentionally, and it gets activated when you start thinking about whether things apply to you or not.
So if you see a word like honest, you think, oh, am I honest or am I not honest? And when you have those kind of thoughts, you can voluntarily activate the default network. But that was discovered maybe...
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Chapter 8: What are practical steps for implementing sense foraging in daily life?
Four or five years after the first publication showing that there's this really consistent, very strong pattern of activity that turns on when you ask people just to do nothing.
Why do you call it the house of habit?
So one thing that we noticed with the default network is whenever things kind of become business as usual, and it feels as though the person is no longer putting in a lot of effort to manipulate things out in the world, the default network kind of takes over.
So as an example, if you had someone pressing a button for left arrow and a different button for right arrow, and they just started doing that task because the first time they'd done it, they're a bit nervous about doing it right. You get all this other stuff happening and...
top and the front of the brain so they can make sure they're getting the job done but after about 20 to 30 seconds they're like oh really that's it i'm just pressing arrows and that's all they're doing a lot of that activation kind of quiets down and the default network kicks back in and part of that might be because they're starting to mind wander a little and a part of it is also that they've automated their response to the world they've created a model for the worlds that exactly fits what they need to do and no updating is needed and that's like the default networks
bread and butter and so what we've also started to see is that people who have really deep self-evaluative habits like rumination people have depression show exaggerated activity of this default network and so these different like pieces of evidence come together that it's on when we're not doing anything in particular that what people report doing a lot of times when they're not doing anything particular they think about themselves like what's for lunch what am i doing in the scanner and that sort of thing that when they do explicitly think about themselves the default network comes online and
And then when they start to automate behaviors, the default network also comes online. And it converged to create this impression that what the default network is doing is instantiating and perpetuating our habits over time. And not only that, that our habits tend to be predominantly self-referential or self-evaluative. We're always worried about how things affect us in particular.
So Zindel, would you say our default mode is a happy place or an unhappy place?
I'd say it's an efficient place. I'd say it's a very self-focused place. And I think that if we ever need to step out of those habits, it becomes very hard because we've relied on them, and very often we have very few opportunities ways of thinking differently outside of habit.
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