The Default Mode Network

(From Wikipedia): In 1995, Bharat Biswal, a graduate student at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, discovered that the human sensorimotor system displayed "resting-state connectivity," exhibiting synchronicity in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans while not engaged in any task.

The discovery of resting-state brain and CNS networks is relatively recent and ridiculously important for consciousness science. Thanks to longstanding neglect of our early training, we ourselves have just learned about them. These states are patently fundamental to how brains and minds work. A moment of self-introspection confirms the idea. Minds wander, they fixate and repeat content, they return characteristically to social and moral judgments, they review the course of one’s life, they return to self-image, they recall the past and look ahead to the future, they construct narratives, they insistently repeat musical themes, they work to stabilize memory and learning, they receive unexpected, numinous and deeply affecting impressions in meditation.

Now that neuroscience has discovered the existence of resting CNS networks, let’s see if we can get it to acknowledge the necessity of networked resting states in formal, human-to-human conversation.