Your Pot of Gold Could Be Your Grave
Presenter:
Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn
Time:
3:26
Summary
Your brain creates all the narratives in your life, from fear to loneliness to anxiety, etc. But it's possible to train your brain through mindfulness to transcend its innate urge to storify everything.
Transcript
If you put people in a scanner and tell them to just do nothing, just rest in the scanner, don't do anything at all. It turns out that there's a region in the midline of the cerebral cortex, um, that's known as the default mode network that just lights up. That just all of a sudden gets very, very active.
Meanwhile, you're told to do nothing and then your brain starts to. energy a lot, a lot of ATP in this, you know, activation in the medial, uh, frontal areas. And that's called the default mode network because when you're told to do nothing, you default to activity in this mode. And when you inquire what's going on there, a lot of it has to do with mind wandering and just daydreaming.