Autopilot Read Online Free

rest. This is a recent discovery, and one that to my knowledge has not reached a popular audience. This book is about taking the idea of reverberation seriously—and using neuroscience as the ultimate excuse for taking it easy. One of the great paradoxes of modern life is that technology, for all its advantages, is actually taking away our leisure time. We are now wired 24/7. Idleness has become an anachronism.
    The “resting-state network” (RSN) or “default-mode network” (DMN), as it is called, was discovered by neuroscientist Marcus Raichle of the Washington University in St. Louis in 2001. This network comes alive when we are not doing anything. Raichle noticed that when his subjects were lying in an MRI scanner and doing the demanding cognitive tasks of his experiments, there were brain areas whose activity actually decreased. This was surprising, because it was previously suspected that during cognitive tasks brain activity should only increase, relative to another task or to a “flat baseline.” This led Raichle to study what the brain was doing in between his experimental tasks. What he discovered was a specific network that increased activity when subjects seemed to disengage from the outside world. When you have to perform some tedious task in an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) experiment such as to memorize a list of words, certain areas of your brain become more active and other areas become less active. This does not seem peculiar. However, if you are just lying in the scanner with your eyes closed or staring up at the screen, brain activity does not decrease. The area of activity merely switches places. The area that deactivates during tasks becomes more active during rest. This is the resting-state network. Since then, hundreds of papers have been published examining brain activity during rest. The discovery of the default mode network has generated a great deal of excitement and controversy.
    Many areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions. For example, the visual cortex processes early visual information and the amygdala generates warnings and helps us decide to fight or flee. The resting-state network is specialized for times when your brain doesn’t have to worry about running from a mugger or checking your iPhone. In the absence of anything in particular to do, the resting-state network lights up and starts talking to itself (i.e., you). This network has a coherent structure in the brain, and there is little variation from person to person. The resting-state network is involved in mind-wandering or daydreaming. The resting network actually becomes active when you are lying in the grass on a sunny afternoon, when you close your eyes, or when you stare out the window at work (if you are lucky enough to have a window at work). Perhaps most interestingly, those elusive “Aha!” moments may occur more often in people who allow their brain’s resting-state networks time to reverberate.
    The idea of a resting-state network is a difficult thing for many experimental psychologists and neuroscientists to accept, because a foundational assumption in cognitive neuroscience is that unless you stimulate the brain with an external signal, any detectable brain activity is just noise. How can there be a coherent brain network dedicated to doing nothing? There is an ongoing controversy within psychology and neuroscience about the significance of the default mode network. The brain is viewed by some psychologists as primarily reflexive, driven only by the momentary demands of the environment.
    Thus, some scientists believe that studying the brain at rest is a waste of time. Even more extreme is the assumption that brain responses to external events emerge from a so-called “flat baseline.” In other words, what your brain is doing while you are doing nothing could not possibly be interesting from a scientific perspective—if you’re doing