For the next 70 years, research focused on the task-positive network, or the network in the brain that is activated when we perform effortful, attention-demanding tasks. It wasn’t until 2001 that Marcus Raichle, MD, a neurologist at Washington University in St. Louis, re-engaged with the puzzling passive activity that Berger had discovered a lifetime ago. Using fMRI scans to look inside the brain, Raichle found that when people zone out and daydream, a particular part of the brain consistently became active. He called this the default-mode network. Interestingly, as soon as Raichle’s subjects
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