Can you de-default the Default Mode?
/The Default Mode Network, the part of the brain that we go to when we are not doing anything special, has huge overlap with what we call our ego. You know the ego – that bit of us that doesn’t want to die when we are having ‘ego dissolution,’ and that bit of us that probably thinks it’s going to die if it loses an argument with someone we don’t like. Unfortunately, of all the places in my brain I could choose to identify as my ‘self,’ this is the one we naturally pick as home ground ‘me,’ the part of my being I am most attached to.
One of the great reliefs that psychedelics give us is a spontaneous holiday from the DMN as, for some reason, the business as usual connections of the Default Mode get disrupted and other connections get forged with disparate and faraway portions of our brain, maybe randomly, maybe not. The same, they say, happens with meditation eventually, perhaps because you spend so much time focusing on the tip of your nose or wherever instead of indulging in your own self-gratifying thoughts. And a similar disruption comes with mystical experiences, where some people, lucky or unlucky I’m not sure which, find that the DMN gets spontaneously overthrown and weird connections between heaven and earth form themselves quite naturally, if alarmingly at times.
A major hallmark of the DMN, or at least its most annoying feature, is ruminating thoughts. Our ruminative thoughts are so repetitive and, well ruminating, that we can even bore our own selves to tears, and after we have done that who is there to turn to? So, a thought about those ruminations is that they happen when we are failing to process our own feelings and sensations, especially the quieter ones that go almost unnoticed. This mode is not just a default, but the default of a person loses contact with the fullness of life. Even as we once again prove Tucker Carlson or whoever is your personal pick for straw man, victory is soured by the fact that we are defaulting to a half-life, a ghost life of the ego:
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
At least that’s how T.S. Eliot put it in The Hollow Men. Personally, I like the dry grass but I don’t think the rats’ feet are very helpful, but more importantly, since he published it in 1925, it’s clear that people have been noticing this semi-detached life for quite some time.
I think that each character we adopt in our internal dialogue, each ‘me’ who heroically steps up to the plate, is an attempt by the brain to form a durable self, someone I can rely on to be consistent and admirable. And since whole swaths of my brain have difficulty in distinguishing between reality and the fantasies it generates, the brain certainly seems to think this dreamy self-deception is worth the effort. The sad thing though, is that as one of the Hollow Men, I don’t believe in this self for more than a few seconds, as I come to the realization that Tucker Carlson, or the headbanger of my choosing, is not there, I just made them up. I return to a more formless me as narrative falls away.
What is to be done, as Lenin asked. Well, besides eating some mushrooms, I think the narrative can be reduced a little if we consider the conditions that create our defaulting. I believe that what is going on is that we start out by feeling some discomfort, emotional and physical, and defend against it by making up stories that will distract us from it. The pluses of that: we do relieve some of the discomfort. The minus: we get to be a bit hollow.
I’m remembering from the blog a couple of weeks ago that brilliant thing someone said to me, ‘A signal is not a command.’ The signal in this case might be some kind of uncomfortable feeling, and the command is to make it go away. “Oh, you can’t make it go away?” says the brain. “Then reduce your awareness of it.” But it turns out this is a flawed strategy and it might be less painful to endure the unpleasant signal as is. Constantly distracting ourselves with rumination must surely create a signal traffic jam, which we register as perennially ‘stuck’ places inside us. Instead of allowing an internal shiver to be a shiver, an internal little nausea to nauseate us, we make up small hero stories about ourselves that exemplify our values, true enough, but only in T S Eliot’s cellar.
Maybe that is why the Lone Ranger never failed to nab the bad guy, why Perry Mason never lost a case, and so on and so on. Those shows and a million others are the default mode of a culture pretending that everything is alright. And for thirty minutes, minus the ads, things do feel alright if you enjoy the show. The culture that reflects us is the one that has formed us, and the good thing is that we can affect it too. Any effort we take towards our own waking up is also helping the culture stir in its sleep as well. By stealing more moments from our default mode by feeling our feelings (by that I mean our interoceptions and body sensations as well as emotions), we are making a contribution. And maybe that is what we do when we are tripping, feeling everything as it is, unimpeded, or much less impeded, by defenses. In that same poem Eliot also says:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.
Somewhere inside us we are stuck believing that it is too dangerous to listen to the voices in the singing wind. I think we were inadvertently taught that by our parents, our teachers and our grandparents in a sort of collective osmosis until it became an absolutely ingrained personal habit. After all, if they had deliberately taught it in school, they would have questioned the wisdom of their default, and the little children would have constantly been getting it wrong. The wordless and unconscious transmission is much more powerful. But now, having taken a psychedelic, or having meditated, we are (occasionally) in the happy place where we can help our grandchildren, all of them, by grappling with that lie and defaulting to sensation instead of daydream. We demonstrate living by living.