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If you put people in the scanner and tell them to just do nothing, just rest in the scanner don’t do anything at all. It turns out that there’s a region in the midline of the cerebral cortex ,that’s known as the default mode network, that just lights up, that just all of a sudden gets very, very active. You’re told to do nothing. And then your brain starts to use up energy, a lot, lot of ATP in this medial frontal areas. And that’s called the default mode network, because when you’re told to do nothing, you default to activity in this mode. And when you inquire what’s going on there, a lot of it has to do with mind wandering, and just daydreaming. And a lot of that has to do with the self-referencing our favorite subject, which is me of course. So we generate narratives, “I wonder how long I’m going to be in the scanner. And I’m feeling a little bit contracted because it’s claustrophobic. And these magnets are banging like crazy.” Or whatever it is, you’re thinking in terms of your you, past, present and future. And you’re developing narratives, “Where I’m going to go to lunch when this is over.” Or whatever it is. And those narratives are a form of self reference. And it’s the story of me.
When you train people in MBSR, you find that another area of the cortex lights up more lateral, after eight weeks of training in mindfulness, that area is associated with a region called the insula. And that doesn’t have a linear time-based narrative. It’s just the experiencing of the present moment in the body, breathing in, breathing out, awake, no narrative, no agenda. This narrative network decreases in activity, and this experiential network increases in activity and they become uncoupled. So they’re no longer caught together in such a way.
So this one can actually attenuate and liberate you a little bit from the constant thinking, thinking, thinking, a lot of which is driven of course by anxiety, and what’s wrong with me. The story of me is often a depressing story, and a fear based story. 30 or 40 years from now, we’re going to have a much, much better understanding of how non-doing influences doing, or how being influences doing. And how the doing that comes out of being is a wiser, more compassionate, more appropriately nuanced doing. And a lot of us, of course, are feeling like we’re doing, doing, doing faster and faster on the treadmill. So maybe when it comes to work or when it comes to family or whatever it is coming to that we’re like driving the car with the brake on, with the emergency brake on. And if we learn how to just kind of release it, everything will unfold with less strain, with less stress, and with a greater sense of life unfolding rather than you’re driving through it to get to some great pot of gold at the end, which might just be your grave.