Meditation and Default Brain Mode
When I was researching an article on the brain aging last summer I did an interview with one of the researchers working at the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest Geriatric Health Care System here in Toronto. She mentioned a study they had completed previously and in the process made mention of something she referred to as a default mode in the brain. As she put it, default mode is what the brain does when it isn’t engaged in any specific activity. It is a kind of ongoing internal conversation but is mostly unconnected gibberish. The study showed that as we age it gets harder and harder to dial down the default mode until it actually interferes with the normal functioning of the brain. From my reading about meditative practices lately I noticed that when people describe what meditation does, it seemed one of the benefits might be to turn down the default brain mode. I also know that mindfulness meditation is being employed more and more in therapies for mental health disorders and perhaps it works because of this function. Mindfulness meditation arises from the Tibetan tradition of Buddhism and I know that the subject of the book, Train Your Mind Change Your Brain, one of the first works about neuroplasticity, was about a conference the Dalai Lama held with the top researchers in neuroscience about a decade ago. The author, Sharon Begley states in the chapter entitled, Transforming the Emotional Mind, “The goals of shamatha practice are to quiet the noise that bedevils the untrained mind, in which one’s focus darts from one sight or sound or thought to another like a hyperactive dragonfly and replace it with attentional stability and clarity.”
I would be most interested in comments from those of you who meditate regularly on this idea.