Default Mode Network: The Brain Science of Ego, Meditation, and Psychedelics

Habits are undeniably useful tools, relieving us of the need to run a complex mental operation every time we’re confronted with a new task or situation.

Yet they also relieve us of the need to stay awake to the world: to attend, feel, think, and then act in a deliberate manner.

If you need to be reminded how completely mental habit blinds us to experience, just take a trip to an unfamiliar country. Suddenly you wake up!

Michael Pollan ~ How to Change Your Mind (2018)

The Moment You Stop Narrating Your Life Story

You have probably felt it before, even if you have never sat on a meditation cushion or taken anything stronger than coffee.

Maybe it happened on a trail with nobody else around, or standing waist deep at the edge of the ocean, or three minutes into a song you were not really listening to.

For a moment, the voice in your head stops narrating.

For a few seconds you feel less like a person watching the world and more like a part of it.

Then it passes, and you go back to being you.

It shows up more reliably in deep meditation, and it shows up dramatically in psychedelic experiences. Almost every contemplative tradition has a name for it.

Zen calls it dropping body and mind. Christian mystics call it union. Someone coming out of a psilocybin session usually says something like “I was everything,” and then apologizes for how that sounds.

For most of human history, these ineffable experiences might have belonged to those deeply convicted in their form of religion. But, now we can watch it happen on a brain scan.

Here is the part I find fascinating. When researchers look at what changes in the brain during deep meditation, and at what changes during a psychedelic experience, they keep landing in the same place: a system called the Default mode Network or (DMN).

That is what this article is about.

I’ll try my best to explain what I am learning about DMN and how this concept seems to crossover from neuroscience, psychology and even spirituality.

What is “The Default Mode Network” (DMN)

Let’s start with the short version: the default mode network is what your brain does when you are not doing anything in particular.

To be more specific, it is a set of connected regions that switches on when your attention turns inward.

It runs your autobiographical memory, your mental time travel into the past and the future, your sense of what other people are thinking, and the running commentary you keep about your own life.

It’s what is working when you replay an argument from Tuesday, rehearse a conversation you have not had yet, or wonder what your coworkers really think of you.

It’s also been called the “me network“.

To keep it simple. If you wanted to point at the neural machinery behind the ordinary, everyday feeling of being a self, this is one way to look at it.

Two hubs do most of the heavy lifting, both sitting along the midline of the brain: the medial prefrontal cortex, tucked behind your forehead, and the posterior cingulate cortex, further back toward the crown of your head. When those two are in close conversation, the network is online.

The interesting part is how we found it, because nobody was looking for it.

Through the 1990s, researchers running brain scans cared about one question: which regions light up when a person performs a task. The quiet stretches between tasks were just the control condition, the boring baseline you measure the interesting stuff against.

Then somebody looked closely at the boring part.

Certain regions were not quiet at all. They were working harder during the rest periods than during the tasks.

In 2001, Marcus Raichle and colleagues at Washington University put a name on it in a paper titled “A default mode of brain function.”

The finding was strange and a little funny. Your brain has a default setting, and that setting is not “off.” Give it nothing to do and it does not idle.

It changes jobs, and the job it changes to is you!

The Wandering Mind

Here is where it gets uncomfortable.

In 2010, Harvard psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert built an iPhone app that pinged people at random moments and asked three questions: What are you doing? What are you thinking about? How happy are you? They collected around 250,000 responses from thousands of people.

The first finding was startling on its own. People reported that their minds were somewhere other than what they were actually doing 46.9 percent of the time. Nearly half of waking life, spent somewhere else.

The second finding was the one that mattered. Mind-wandering made people less happy, and it did so fairly consistently, even when the mind wandered to pleasant topics. More than that, whether a person’s mind was wandering predicted their happiness better than what they were physically doing. The activity mattered less than the presence.

The authors summed it up in a line that has been quoted ever since: a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.

Now stack that against what we know about the default mode network. Mind-wandering is largely a default mode network activity. And when that network runs hot and rigid, we have a clinical name for it.

In depression it looks like rumination, the same painful thought circling endlessly.

In anxiety it looks like rehearsal, the same feared future replayed on a loop. In both cases, the self keeps thinking about the self, and cannot stop.

Contemplative traditions worked this out a few thousand years before the fMRI machine(Functional MRI). Every one of them, in its own idiom, says some version of the same thing: the suffering is not out there in your circumstances, it is in here, in the compulsive activity of the mind.

You’ve probably heard the quote “Be Here Now”

That advice has always been easy to say and hard to take seriously, because it sounds like a platitude. What the research adds is a mechanism. Presence or Being Present isn’t just a nice feeling.

It is a measurably different mode of brain function.

What Meditation Does to the Network

In 2011, Judson Brewer and colleagues at Yale ran experienced meditators and matched beginners through an fMRI scanner while they meditated. They used three different practices: concentration, loving-kindness, and choiceless awareness.

The result was clean. Across all three types of meditation, the main nodes of the default mode network, the medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate cortices, were relatively deactivated in the experienced meditators compared with the novices.

Different techniques, same effect. The practices differ in their instructions but converge on the same neural outcome: less activity in the machinery of self-referential thought, which is exactly what you would predict from people who report less mind-wandering.

There was a second finding worth contemplating. The experienced meditators also showed different connectivity patterns in those regions, and the difference showed up not only during meditation but at rest.

The practice appears to change the baseline, not just the moment.

This is, I think, the most quietly radical claim in contemplative neuroscience. Meditation is not simply a relaxing thing you do for twenty minutes. It is training. You are rehearsing a mode of attention often enough that the brain starts defaulting to it.

Buddhism arrived at the philosophical version of this a long time ago with the doctrine of anatta, or no-self: the claim that the solid, continuous self you feel yourself to be is not a thing but a process, a construction the mind performs and can stop performing. Read that alongside the brain-imaging data and the two accounts start to rhyme in a way that is hard to dismiss as coincidence.

What Psychedelics Do to the Same Network

Now the other road.

In 2012, Robin Carhart-Harris and colleagues at Imperial College London gave volunteers intravenous psilocybin inside an fMRI scanner. Going in, the expectation among many researchers was that psychedelics would light the brain up, that all that vividness and intensity had to mean more activity.

The opposite happened. Psilocybin reduced blood flow and neural activity, and the biggest reductions were in the brain’s key connector hubs, including the posterior cingulate cortex and medial prefrontal cortex. The same two regions from the meditation study.

The subjective effects tracked the neural ones. The more the default mode network’s integrity broke down, the more strongly participants reported the experience of ego dissolution: the temporary loss of the sense of being a bounded, separate self.

A companion finding from Leor Roseman and colleagues in 2014 filled in the other half of the picture. While connectivity within networks went down, connectivity between networks went up. Regions that normally keep to their own lanes started talking to each other. The brain became less rigidly organized and more globally interconnected.

Put those together and you get a decent working picture of what a psychedelic does. It loosens the brain’s usual hierarchy. The network that maintains the self quiets down, and the strict separation between systems relaxes.

It seems, that the term became more popularized after Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind was released.

He spends a good stretch of the book with Carhart-Harris and the Imperial College group, and he is a useful guide precisely because he came to the subject as a skeptic in his sixties rather than as a true believer.

One visual metaphor I believe helped me understand described the mind as a snow-covered hill, with thoughts running the same sled tracks over and over until the grooves are too deep to steer out of.

A psychedelic, in this telling, is a fresh snowfall. The old ruts are still there underneath, but for a while new paths are possible. It is a metaphor rather than a mechanism, but it captures what the imaging data hints at better than most technical descriptions manage to.

[LINK: “ego dissolution” → Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy post, or the glossary entry in it] [LINK: “psilocybin” or “psychedelic therapy” → Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy post] [AFFILIATE: Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind, fits naturally here.]

The Convergence: Two Roads, One Destination

So we have two practices that could hardly be more different in method, cost, legality, or cultural baggage. One takes years of disciplined sitting. One takes a few hours and a compound. And they both turn down the same network.

Someone eventually did the obvious experiment.

In 2019, Lukasz Smigielski and colleagues at the University of Zurich ran a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study with 38 experienced meditators on a five-day mindfulness retreat. Half received a single dose of psilocybin during the retreat; half received placebo. Everyone was scanned before and after.

The psilocybin group showed the decoupling you would expect between the medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate cortices, and that decoupling was specifically associated with the reported experience of ego dissolution. The interesting part came later: both the experiential and the neural measures predicted better psychosocial functioning at a four-month follow-up.

Not just a peak experience. A change with a tail on it.

I want to be careful here, because this is the point where popular writing about the brain usually overreaches. The two roads are not identical. A meditator’s DMN quieting is gradual, self-generated, and voluntary. A psychedelic’s is abrupt, chemically driven, and not fully under anyone’s control. The subjective experiences are related but not interchangeable, and one carries risks the other does not.

But the shared mechanism is real, and it reframes something. If the sense of being a separate self is partly the output of an identifiable brain network, then the mystic’s claim starts to sound less like metaphor. When contemplatives across every tradition report that the boundary between self and world is not as solid as it appears, they are not making a poetic gesture. They have found a way to interrupt a specific process, and they are reporting what is left.

The Sufis have a word for this, fana, the annihilation or passing away of the self in the divine. It is not a metaphor for feeling humble. It is a description of an experience, one that shows up in Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, and Indigenous traditions under different names, and now shows up on a scanner as a change in antero-posterior connectivity.

[LINK: this is a good spot to link → What Is the Meaning of Life? (science of meaning section)]

Why a Quieter Self Might Heal

If default mode network overactivity maps onto rumination, and rumination is a core feature of depression and anxiety, then a treatment that interrupts it starts to make mechanical sense.

That is roughly the current working hypothesis behind why psychedelic-assisted therapy seems to help people whom conventional treatment has failed. The compound loosens a rigid pattern. It creates an opening. What happens in that opening is where the therapy does its work.

There is a second piece. Laboratory research has found that classic psychedelics promote structural plasticity, the growth of new dendritic spines and synaptic connections in the cortex. Depression and chronic stress tend to do the reverse, eroding those connections. So the picture is not only that a rigid network gets loosened, but that the brain may enter a window in which it is unusually ready to form new patterns.

Two caveats, stated plainly, because both matter.

First, most of that plasticity evidence comes from cell cultures and rodents. Confirming it in humans is active, unfinished work. Anyone telling you it is settled is ahead of the data.

Second, and this is the one almost every article on this subject gets wrong: the default mode network is not the villain.It is not a bug to be switched off. That network gives you autobiographical memory, the ability to plan, the capacity to imagine another person’s point of view, and a coherent identity that persists from Tuesday to Wednesday. A person without a functioning default mode network would not be enlightened. They would be in serious trouble.

The goal is not silence. It is flexibility. A default mode network that can quiet down when it is not needed, rather than one that runs constantly and drags you into the same loop for the four hundredth time. Health looks like a self you can set down and pick back up, not a self you have destroyed.

How to Quiet Your Own Default Mode Network

The practical question. Most of the research above involves either years of practice or a controlled clinical setting, but the everyday version is more accessible than it sounds. A few approaches with reasonable evidence behind them:

Focused-attention meditation. The most direct route, and the one with the most data. Rest attention on the breath, notice when it wanders, bring it back. The noticing and returning is the repetition that does the training, so wandering is not failure, it is the exercise.

Open-awareness practice. Instead of holding one object, let attention rest wide and receive whatever arrives without following it. This was one of the practices in the Brewer study, and it produced the same deactivation.

Slow, deliberate breathing. The simplest entry point, and useful precisely because it is boring. Attention has somewhere to go that is not your own story.

Time in nature, and awe. Awe experiences, standing in front of something vast, seem to produce a version of the same self-diminishment, sometimes called the “small self” effect. It is a milder cousin of what the studies above describe, available on a hike.

Flow states. Absorption in a task at the edge of your ability, whether that is music, climbing, cooking, or writing, tends to quiet self-referential thought as a side effect. People consistently report losing track of themselves. That is the network standing down.

Full attention to something ordinary. Washing dishes and only washing dishes. This is the least glamorous item on the list and possibly the most useful, since it does not require setting aside any additional time.

[AFFILIATE: Mindvalley meditation/consciousness course, or Waking Up app, fits here. Keep to one.]

What I would not do is treat the psychedelic route as a shortcut on this list. Those compounds are largely illegal, carry real risks, and belong in a supervised setting with proper screening. If that is the direction you are curious about, read the dedicated article rather than improvising.

[LINK: “the dedicated article” → Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy post]

Many Paths, One Source

There is something almost funny about where this research has landed.

For centuries, the claim that the self is a construction, and that seeing through it brings relief, was the province of monks and mystics, and was treated by the scientifically minded as pleasant superstition.

Then we built machines that could watch the brain work, pointed them at meditators and at people on psilocybin, and found a specific network whose quieting corresponds to precisely the experience those traditions had been describing all along.

The monk on the cushion and the volunteer in the scanner are doing different things by different means with different risks. But at the level of the brain, they are both turning down the same voice. The one that narrates, compares, worries, and insists on its own separateness.

What the traditions have always claimed is that when that voice goes quiet, what remains is not emptiness but something larger.

Neuroscience doesn’t attempt to prove the theological or spiritual aspect.

What it can tell us is that the door those traditions described is real, that it has hinges we can now identify, and that human beings have found more than one way to open it.

Final Thoughts

I’ve heard so many references to this Default Mode Network over the years, from neuroscientists, and authors in various documentaries and books. This was an opportunity to learn more about what this actually is and how it relates to me.

What got me was how ordinary the default mode network turns out to be. It is not some exotic corner of the brain reserved for monks and psychonauts.

It is running right now, in you and in me, narrating this sentence, keeping score, rehearsing a conversation neither of us is having yet. Nearly half of our waking hours, if that Harvard study is right. I had always assumed the wandering mind was just the background noise of being alive. It turns out to be a specific system doing a specific job, and it can be turned down.

That reframe hit me harder than I expected, and I think it is because of where I spent my twenties. Years before any of this, I worked as a mental health counselor on a hospital psychiatric unit, first with adults and later mostly with children and teenagers. I did not have this vocabulary then, but I recognize now what I was looking at. People stuck in a loop they could not step out of.

The same thought running the same track until the track was all there was. The hardest part of that work was never the crisis itself.

It was watching how exhausted people were by their own minds.

So the thing I have actually taken from this research is not the dramatic part. It is the boring part.

The big experiences get all the attention, and I understand why. They are vivid, they make good stories, and I do not regret mine. What the research keeps pointing at is much less cinematic. The network quiets a little every time you give your attention somewhere else and leave it there. A walk without headphones. Ten minutes focusing on only your breath. Actually washing the dishes instead of thinking about work while your hands are wet.

So many times, I have come to certain realizations or solved technical problems while taking a shower or going for a walk and that’s something I have to constantly remind myself when I am feeling stuck.

I would love to write about how I now sit in silence for an hour every morning. I do not.

What has changed is smaller than that, but still beneficial to me.

I notice the narrating or I like to call it self-talk more often. I try my best to catch myself halfway through an argument with someone who is not in the room, and now I have a name for what is happening, which makes it easier to put down. Not gone.

Just easier to identify, more often, on purpose.

There is something almost funny about where all of this has landed. For centuries, the claim that the self is a construction, and that seeing through it brings relief, belonged to mystics and was treated by serious people as pleasant superstition.

Then we built machines that could watch the brain work, pointed them at meditators and at people on psilocybin, and found a network whose quieting lines up with exactly what those traditions had been describing the whole time.

Neuroscience doesn’t attempt to prove any spiritual or theological claims and I don’t think it needs to.

This science shows us what many wisdom traditions have been pointing to and suggests that there is some real findings here for consideration of these relationships.

For me, it is more confirmation that certain mind states that may have been considered only subjective in the past do have a means to be observed assessed and evaluated.

Thank you for joining me on this journey.

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