humans rely on two separate networks to process social and nonsocial thinking. He likens the back-and-forth activity between these networks to a “neural seesaw.” When we’re doing our taxes or chemistry homework or engineering a bridge, our nonsocial pathways are active. When we’re meeting a friend for lunch or helping our kids with their homework, the action shifts to the social network. But what happens, he wondered, when we’re just kicking back and doing nothing? What’s our default network? The answer astonished him. “Whenever we finish doing some kind of non-social thinking,” he told
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