The brain’s default mode network is a topic I have written about several times; most recently in Thrill: The High Sensation Seeking Highly Sensitive Person. We know that the more Adverse Childhood Events (ACEs) we experience as young children the greater brain development and function seems to be impaired potentially throughout the life course. Here, author Drake Baer offers us a deeper glimpse into the Default Mode Network and assesses the potential for reforming our baseline cognitive phenomena.
Is the Default Mode of the Brain to Suffer?
If you’re going to get any sort of science done, an experiment needs a control group: the unaffected, possibly placebo-ed population that didn’t take part in whatever intervention it is you’re trying to study. Back in the earlier days of cognitive neuroscience, the control condition was intuitive enough: Just let the person in the brain scanner lie in repose, awake yet quiet, contemplating the tube they’re inside of. But in 1997, 2001, and beyond, studies kept coming out saying that it wasn’t much of a control at all. When the brain is “at rest,” it’s doing anything but resting.
When you don’t give its human anything to do, brain areas related to processing emotions, recalling memory, and thinking about what’s to come become quietly active. These self-referential streams of thought are so pervasive that in a formative paper Marcus Raichle, a Washington University neurologist who helped found the field, declared it to be the “the default mode of brain function,” and the constellation of brain areas that carry it out are the default mode network, or DMN. Because when given nothing else to do, the brain defaults to thinking about the person it’s embedded in. Since then, the DMN has been implicated in everything from depression to creativity. People who daydream more tend to have a more active DMN; relatedly, dreaming itself appears to be an amplified version of mind-wandering.
In Buddhist traditions, this chattering described by neuroscientists as the default mode is a dragon to be tamed, if not slain. Chögyam Trungpa, who was instrumental in bringing Tibetan Buddhism to the U.S., said the meditation practice is “necessary generally because our thinking pattern, our conceptualized way of conducting our life in the world, is either too manipulative, imposing itself upon the world, or else runs completely wild and uncontrolled,” he wrote in Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism. “Therefore, our meditation practice must begin with ego’s outermost layer, the discursive thoughts which continually run through our minds, our mental gossip.”
In his book Mindfulness for Beginners: Reclaiming the Present Moment ― and Your Life, Jon Kabat-Zinn, the founder of mindfulness-based stress reduction, argues that this idle narration, this “selfing,” is something that needs to be reined in order to have a balanced mental life. When the DMN “predominates, especially out of unawareness, it can very much limit our understanding of ourselves and of what might be possible,” he argues. The crux of the Buddhist argument is that if you don’t establish some relationship with your DMN, some mindfulness of its activity, you’ll be yanked around by the swirling eddies of emotion, reaction, and rumination. But what do brain sciences say?
Whether or not your default activity is helpful or harmful depends on where your mind automatically tends to go, says Scott Barry Kaufman, the scientific director at the Imagination Institute at the University of Pennsylvania. In the same way that your tongue defaults to probing a cut on the roof of your mouth, the brain is attracted to unresolved issues. “People differ drastically regarding if their default mode network content is creative or ruminative,” he says.
In a way, the DMN is like a scout, ranging about for prospective futures. To Kaufman, the default mode has a “prospective bias”: It’s seeking out big-picture strategies for what could be. Depending on the person, their history, and their biological dispositions, that prospection could tilt toward worrying or hoping. As psychologists have contended for decades, daydreaming itself has at least three different flavors: positive constructive daydreaming, which has lots of playful, wishful imagery and plan-making thoughts; guilty-dysphoric daydreaming, which has lots of anguish and obsessive fantasies; and poor attentional control, where it’s hard to concentrate on anything. “Prospection can lead to suffering if it hinders executive attention, the ability to have awe, attention to the present moment,” he says, emphasizing that, as with so many others ways that our minds get into trouble, the problem is rigidity; research indicates that a disturbed DMN is a mechanism in depression. “Our greatest source of suffering isn’t the default mode,” Kaufman says, “but when we get stuck in the default mode.”
Indeed, the peripatetic nature of the DMN can be harnessed for creative thinking. In a 2015 Scientific Reports paper that Kaufman co-authored, 25 participants were asked to do creative thinking tasks, including the standard measure of divergent thinking, asking how many uses you can come up with for a brick (spoiler alert: doorstop and weapon are two go-to options). At the start of the task, the DMN coupled with the salience network, which selects which stimuli to attend to, and toward the end of the task, it coupled with the executive network, which is responsible for the control of attention and working memory — results that suggest that producing creative ideas requires a combination of focusing internal attention and controlling spontaneous thinking. “The DMN contributes to the (more or less) spontaneous generation of (potentially useful) ideas,” co-author and Harvard postdoc Roger Beaty told Science of Us via email.
It underscores the fact that not all minds that wander are lost. University of British Columbia philosopher Evan Thompson, author of Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy, says the DMN’s mental meanderings are “the baseline state of you as a cognitive system.” It’s tremendously pragmatic: being able to remember the past, plan for the future, and happen upon creative insights are all essential tools for navigating life. While he was hesitant to mix the word “suffering,” which is so loaded in ancient Asian religious traditions, with the “default mode,” which is of a contemporary neural vintage, the two connect in the way that suffering arises when people concretize the fleeting swirls of thought, especially around conceptions of self. Still, he says, there’s “particular kind of stickiness” that can come when DMN activity grows overly self-centered.
Default-mode content involves an image of self, one that’s easy to become attached to. These self-conceptions are “affectively charged,” he says; they carry lots of emotional weight. “We constantly think that it’s not just another thought, that [the image of self] is something real, not just an mental image.”
He compared it with a strawberry and thoughts of a strawberry. If you’re a particularly good imaginer, you might start salivating at the image of a ripe, inviting strawberry. Still, it’s just a mental image; not an actual strawberry. The “selfing” conjured up by the DMN is a lot like that: images of who you think you are, but not who you actually are. While you wouldn’t take a mental image of a strawberry to be an appropriate filling to a real-world shortcake, it’s easy to take your mental images of you to be your real-world self.
“The self isn’t one thing, it’s an evolving construct of many different processes,” Thompson says.“Contemplative traditions like Buddhism and yoga would say that habitually investing in the image of the self more reality than it actually has is a source of great difficulty. When we take it to be real when it isn’t, according to these traditions, then that causes suffering.” He mentioned that in cognitive behavioral therapy, that process of divesting realness from your mental chatter is called “decentering,” or thinking less that your thoughts are the truth about what’s happening and viewing them as an observer. The therapeutic interventions offered by psilocybin and LSD — which, at least in one trial, helped longtime smokers quit at a rate three times that of the best pharma drugs — seem to have a similar, though more sudden, effect.
At a phenomenological, subjective, what-it’s-like level, the trouble or lack thereof that your DMN gets into seems to depend on how automatic (or de-automatized) your patterns of thought are. Lots of our trains of thought, as suggest by the term train, speed along as if carried by a locomotive, one after another, carried by mental-emotional momentum. If you’re more biologically sensitive to perceived threats, it’s likely that it’s a direct line to rumination, or negatively, recursively reflecting on how you’re bad at your job, rock-climbing, dealing with your family on holidays, or whatever the task is. Though by that point the amygdala, so present in neuroticism, will probably be involved, too.
The key is what brain science people call “cognitive flexibility”: being able to more freely choose your mental habits, and have greater agency in your cognitive phenomena. CBT and even hypnosis are options for taming an unruly DMN, as is the fashionable yet ancient practice of meditation. Study after study indicates that meditation reduces activity in the DMN. Judson Brewer, psychiatrist and director of research at the UMass Medical School Center for Mindfulness founded by Kabat-Zinn, has found that extended meditation practice reforms the DMN, so that the default mode itself shifts: The resting state of the brain becomes more like the meditative state, producing “a more present-centered default mode.” So maybe that’s what all that advice to live in the present moment is getting at: If you can invest more attention in the sensory world than in your narrative overlaying it, you might identify the former, rather than the latter, to be what’s true.
implicitly, greater personal energy. One writer described the winter solstice as the return of Yang energy (Yin representing the counterbalancing energy that dwindles until the winter solstice). With the return of Yang energy (or simply greater sunlight if you prefer) we have an amazing opportunity to ride along on the upswing. What’s holding you back?
Dr. Tracy Cooper 
It’s always an honor to bring in Randy Wooden, Director of Goodwill Industries of Northwest North Carolina’s Professional Center, to share his career perspective. Today he writes about career reinvention.
Are you feeling burned out, frustrated, unfulfilled… and ready for “something different” in your career? Feel like you’re at a fork in the road? Should you “settle” for your present work or carve out a new path?
Most of us have felt this way at some point in our professional life. And, whether it’s our employer laying us off or our proactively leaving, the thought of reinventing ourselves can be both a daunting and confusing challenge.
Let’s explore the reinvention topic. What drives it? How do you go about the discovery process? How do you land that next gig once you’ve determined what you’d like to do?
First, don’t confuse reinventing with mid-life crisis. Changing course isn’t limited to the over-40 crowd. It can occur at any point in your career. Some factors in play may include a sense that what you do doesn’t have value to society, your work isn’t challenging, you never seem to feel “in control” or “caught up” at work, you’re in a dead end job or perhaps a dying industry, etc.
It’s one thing to want to progress in your field, whether that simply means a change of company or more senior job title. It’s another to want a change of job function and/or industry. Yet, we’re creatures of habit where change creates anxiety and fear in many.
Change often depends on our perspective. Fear of the unknown versus growth opportunity. The book, Who Moved My Cheese? is a quick read and may help with focusing on the positives of stepping out of our comfort zone. I call it a “comfortable rut.” We know our job and probably perform it well, but we’re simply trading our time for a paycheck. And before we know it, 20 years fly by.
Many of my clients reach their fork in the road as a result of being laid off. Perhaps you’re in the same boat. Sure, you didn’t feel fulfilled in your past job, but it provided an income and your desire to leave never trumped the hurdles involved with charting a new course. Now that the rug has been pulled out from underneath you you’re forced to take a closer look at what your next job will look like.
You could pursue a similar position. After all, you’re most marketable sticking with what you’ve done. But perhaps your industry is dying. Maybe you’re facing age or other issues (lack of a degree, for instance) which make it difficult to continue your same work with a different company.
What if you want to try something else? How should you go about determining that next step… a step outside your comfort zone?
Begin by taking inventory of what you like—and don’t like—about work you’ve done. The easiest transitions are maintaining your function while switching industries or maintaining your present industry while switching job functions.
Conduct informational interviews with people from industries and/or job functions you think you might enjoy. Additionally, there are many assessments you can take to help guide you based on your interests, aptitudes, and personality.
Questions to ask during these informational interviews should revolve around several topics: The present and longer term outlook for that industry and job function, walking you through a typical day and the primary challenges, any barriers (education/licensure) you’d face to become eligible, likely compensation, etc.
Be sure to ask for additional names of people within the field so as to gain a deeper understanding of what you might be getting into. I can’t stress this enough. Look before you leap.
Here’s a true client story from years ago:
He came to me after only a year or two as a frustrated high school teacher. His father and grandfather had worked in the steel mills of Pennsylvania. My client started there as well, moved into supervision, but wanted to break away from factory life and become a “professional.”
He thought teaching would be much easier than the steel mills. After all, he “knew” teachers only work nine months out of the year, get off at 3pm, have weekends and plenty of holidays off, etc. So he went to college for an undergraduate and his Master’s in Education. Never once did he speak with teachers in any detail to learn the truth about his preconceptions.
So here he was in a lower paying, stressful role, dealing with unruly kids while lacking support from parents and school administrators, and working evenings and weekends. To compound matters, he’d made more money in the mills than teaching AND was unable to get his old job back because he was too highly educated.
Had he invested the time to learn about the teaching profession I know he’d have made different choices. Look before you leap!
Now that you have an idea what you’d like to do, how do you go about landing that next job?
First, don’t expect headhunters to be much help. They operate in a “round peg—round hole” environment where it’s next to impossible to collect a placement fee for someone changing functions and/or industries. They’re good at keeping folks in the same sort of work where the vast majority of their experience lies.
Because changing industries and functions help make you more of a “square peg—round hole” person, you’ll really want to focus on networking and revamping your resume. Simply submitting your standard chronological resume and waiting for the phone to ring won’t get it done.
People tend to hire those they know, like and trust. Become known to those in your new field. Develop target companies. Use LinkedIn to target key individuals within those companies. Knowing someone in the company—or at least knowing someone who can influence a hiring official—can go a long way toward generating an initial interview.
Your resume may need to be changed from a chronological to a skills-based version. The Internet has many templates for inspiration. Remember, instead of tying your accomplishments to the job where you had them, you’ll now want to tie your accomplishments to the respective transferrable skill you’re promoting.
During interviews you’ll need to have solid answers to concerns about how you’ll add value to the organization or why they should hire you, why you’re seeking a career change, what salary you’re anticipating, etc.
The beauty of networking and informational interview is you’ll obtain information along the way to easily help you address those questions.
While change can be difficult, it can also be liberating. Many people take the safe route and stick with their “comfortable rut.” But for those considering a substantive change, I hope I’ve encouraged you and provided some actionable steps to help you reach that next great gig. Good luck!
Ready for more career development articles by Brad and Randy?
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Randy Wooden is a long-time career consultant and Director of Goodwill Industries of Northwest North Carolina’s Professional Center. You may reach him at rwooden@goodwillnwnc.org (link sends e-mail) or at (336) 464-0516. Access the Center’s free videos at www.goodwillprofessionalcenter.org
Brad Waters, MSW is a career coach-consultant who works nationwide with non-traditional career seekers, freelancers, creatives, introverts, Millennials, and corporate career changers. He helps people clarify their career direction and take action on career-life transitions. Request a free consultation and access free resources at BradWatersCoaching.com or call 773-789-9330.
(additional comments from Dr. Cooper)
One of the best strategies offered in this article is to research actual conditions in any career you are considering. Many people chose to return to college in an effort to completely reinvent themselves. They also, most likely, did not investigate the proposed new career very well and were willing to take the risk that it would all “just work out.” In some cases, I am sure the results are tolerable. In others, it may be quite a shock to realize that one’s new career has a “suck” factor that is beyond imagination. This is particularly true when we have chosen college as a way of moving from one socioeconomic class to another. Often what we find is each level has a suck factor regardless of income level or prestige.
If you are contemplating returning to college I highly advise choosing a program that contains an internship component. Internships allow you to experience life on the job as it actually exists. Not only is this invaluable in gaining real-life experience on the job learning about working conditions and the interpersonal environment but internships may also lead you directly to your first real job post-graduation. In some cases, your first job may be with your internship partner. In others, you will find your first position as a result of having made contacts while in the internship who will lead you to that first great job. Never discount the value of references that may result from internships as well. We all are more willing to vouch for a person we have worked with and like. College programs without internship or practicum components may be less likely to open the doors you likely need help with.
Highly sensitive people come in all flavors and types. No two of us are the same. Similarly, some of us may be great at networking while others suffer greatly from our inability to make useful connections. Choosing a program with an internship represents an opportunity to put yourself out there and let your best qualities shine. Depending on your programmatic choice you may be well-suited to your new career or find you have made an error and need to recalculate. It happens…
Changing careers, even within a profession, may be anxiety-producing. This is especially true for those of us who may have been deeply affected by adverse childhood events (ACEs). For those of us who experienced ACE’s our brains may be hard-wired for overreaction with less connectivity between the thinking center of our brain and the fight or flight center. When we think change we think fear! We think paralysis and withdrawal from the fear. If we are lucky we have others in our lives whom we can look to for strength, courage, or a strong shoulder when we need it. Contemplating a change of career for some may be a matter of life and death.
In my consulting work, I often encounter clients who have job hopped a great deal and have never quite found the right position that meets their needs. It’s bad enough in a society that sees any sort of instability in work as a sign of emotional “weakness” and this is exacerbated by the very real feelings clients may have regarding anxiety, boredom, lack of meaning in their work or other factors that combine to make staying in a position untenable. I feel great empathy in these circumstances as I have experienced them as well. Often what I find is that clients may not have a full appreciation of the array of factors that may be conspiring to sabotage their best efforts to find a workable career. My job has often been to help clients reframe their thinking (perception) of their current situation and empower them with tools to move forward on their own.
As a part of that effort to help HSPs understand the complex nature of career I wrote Thrive: The Highly Sensitive Person and Career in 2015. This year I released Thrill: The High Sensation Seeking Highly Sensitive Person as an examination of the intersection of two traits that about one-third of highly sensitive people have (myself included): sensation seeking and sensory processing sensitivity. I included an extensive chapter on career and continue to examine new strategies that may be of use to HSPs in navigating the complex world of career.
You may find my website at drtracycooper.com.