I’ve always been fascinated by the default mode network (DMN) due to its apparent role in our subjective experience of day-to-day life. I’d like to use this post to collect various interesting papers related to the DMN.
This paper by Yangmei Luo et al. is titled Resting-state functional connectivity of the default mode network associated with happiness [3], and it purports to show that unhappy individuals have higher functional connectivity in the default mode network which leads to excess rumination. I’ve heard this jokingly referred to as the “thinking to depression pipeline.”
This next paper, by Kathleen Garrison et al., is about the effect of a certain type of meditation on the default mode network. Its title is Meditation leads to reduced default mode network activity beyond an active task [2]. The subjects of this paper were specialists in Theraveda meditation, and they were found to experience decreased DMN activity when performing tasks as compared to the control group. Why compare brain activity during performance of a task? It seems that meditators enter a different state during rest (i.e. when not performing a task) than the general population – making resting DMN activity hard to compare.
Mindfulness meditation increases default mode, salience, and central
executive network connectivity
[1],
by Benno Bremer et al., concludes that one month of mindfulness meditation leads to a sort of balance between the central executive network (a brain
network related to problem solving and working memory), and the DMN.
