You’re sitting on the plane, staring out of the window at the clouds and all of a sudden, you think back to how a few months ago, you had a heart-to-heart with a good colleague about the pressure you experience at work. How do thoughts seemingly completely unrelated to the present pop into our heads? Why do we remember certain things and not others? Why does our mind go off on tangents and why do we have daydreams?
Underlying these processes is a shared pattern of common brain activity, in regions which together make up the “default mode network”, discovered and named by neurologist Marcus Raichle in the early 2000s. It’s engaged when we are daydreaming, thinking about ourselves or others, recalling memories, or imagining future events.
The default mode network becomes engaged when people appear to be doing “nothing” (hence the term “default”). This is usually when we are in a relaxed state and not focusing on a task or goal – think, sitting on a plane, staring out the window.
