Exploring your mind—Part 2

Your Default Mode Network

In the previous post, I described the zazen meditation and asked you to do it. If you haven’t done so, please do it now, before reading this post. In what follows, I will describe my own meditation. Your experience might be different from mine, though, and if you read about my experience first, it might contaminate yours. So please take a moment—more precisely, three minutes—to do zazen, and then return to this post.

The first time I did the zazen meditation, I had very low expectations. My reasoning: Since it was my mind, I was in control of my thoughts, meaning that when I stopped actively thinking, my mind would go blank.

These expectations were confirmed, but only for a few seconds, at which point I found myself thinking about what I would have for dinner. I dismissed this thought, only to have another drift in, regarding an item on my to-do list. I dismissed it as well, but soon found myself thinking about something someone had recently said to me. It was a critical remark. Was it correct?

Although I had been comfortably seated when I began my meditation, I found myself noticing the physical sensations I was experiencing and as a result started feeling uncomfortable. Did the rules of zazen, I wondered, allow me to fidget? Maybe two minutes into the meditation, I realized that my mind had gotten sidetracked. I had completely forgotten that I was meditating and was instead simply daydreaming. I again silenced my mind, only to find myself thinking about how much time was left. Surely three minutes had passed! Maybe I had set the timer wrong?

When the alarm finally sounded, I was relieved, as well as surprised by just how active my mind had been. Buddhists, I concluded, are right: We do have a “monkey mind.” I was also a bit disturbed. It was my mind, and yet it clearly had a mind of its own!

Besides having a readily detectable conscious mind, we have a subconscious mind, and when we sleep, it goes into action. It creates—in real time, no less!—hi-res full-color 3D videos that, although connected with the reality we experience in waking life, are themselves fantastical. On waking, we might be so astonished by what we have experienced that we share our dream with other people. They will typically respond by dismissing it as being just a crazy dream and might add that they have them all the time. If, however, they believe us to be God’s chosen prophet, they might interpret our dream as being not crazy, but a revelation from God on high. Dreams, it turns out, play an important role in many religions.

Although we readily admit that our subconscious mind takes control of our thought processes while we are asleep, we might assume that when we wake up, it dials back and therefore has little impact on our daily thinking. Doing the zazen meditation, though, provides us with striking evidence that our subconscious mind is still at work.

Once we become aware of how little control we have over the thoughts that drift into our mind, they can be a bit annoying. They are like insistent children who distract us when we are trying to get something done. The situation could be worse, though.

The thoughts I experienced during zazen were “polite,” in the sense that when I dismissed them, they left without a fuss, but this isn’t the case with many of the thoughts I have when I wake up in the middle of the night. Rather than drifting into my mind, they barge their way in. They might be thoughts about something that has upset me or about something I have to do the next day. When I try to dismiss them so I can get back to sleep, they don’t budge, or they leave but barge their way back in after a minute or so. These intrusive thoughts are annoying, but obsessive thoughts would be even worse. Such thoughts can take control of our life.

Neuroscientists have discovered that our brain has a default mode network (DMN) that plays an important role in our mental existence. When we are asleep, it influences our dreams, and when we are awake, it is the source of the thoughts that arise “out of nowhere,” including those we experienced during a zazen meditation.

We do have some power over our default mode network. In particular, if we intently focus our attention on something, our DMN will go dormant. In this state, we might also become oblivious to the world around us and might even experience “flow.” Maintaining this state, however, can be mentally exhausting, and as soon as we drop our guard, our DMN will spring back into action.

Our brain, as we have seen, is a power-hungry organ: Although it represents only ~2 percent of our body’s mass, it consumes ~20 percent of its power, even when our brain is “at rest.” This suggests that even when we are not consciously thinking, there is a lot going on in our brain. A significant portion of this power is presumably consumed by our DMN.

Although the thoughts generated by our DMN can be annoying, they can also be a blessing. This is particularly the case if we are engaged in a creative endeavor. Suppose, for example, that when writing an article—like this one—we run into a problem. We might, for example, realize that there is an inconsistency between what we are saying at one point and what we are saying at another. We might spend an hour trying to find a workaround but give up in frustration. The best strategy in such a situation is to literally sleep on it.

Return to the problem the next day, and we might be delighted to realize that we have the solution. To explain such events, we can invoke magic or the notion of a muse. A more plausible explanation, though, is that while we slept, our subconscious mind was hard at work on the problem. It is apparently less regimented than our conscious mind and therefore more willing to consider unconventional solutions.

As a writer, I have mixed feelings about my default mode network. Although I wish it wouldn’t distract me so much while I am trying to work, I also know that without its help, my wellspring of ideas would likely run dry.