The Buddha (The Resting State) For years when scientists used MRIs to assess the brain’s activity, they studied what activates the brain when it’s given a specific task (like counting backward from one thousand). But around the turn of the twenty-first century, scientists started looking at what happens when we’re just sitting with our own thoughts. What they discovered was that there is a complex and highly integrated network in the brain that only activates when we are “doing nothing.” This is known as the default mode network. Our understanding of its functioning is still new, but we know
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