Does Our Brain Rest When We Do Nothing?

Our brains are just like our phones. If you think it has put itself in power saving mode You are quite wrong. Because this organ continues to be active even when we think we are not doing anything useful.

Well, we What exactly does our brain do when we are not busy with anything?

In fact, until the late 20th century, we were unaware of what was going on in our brains.

However, with the development of technology, we now know to a large extent what is happening in our brains during various activities. Namely, a neurologist named Marcus Raichle performed brain scans with fMRI in 2001 and He managed to open the doors full of secrets.

In this study, called fMRI, the person’s brain could be imaged while he was busy with something. For example, when a person presses a button with his right hand, fMRI The part of the left hemisphere of the brain close to the motor cortex was activated.

Although neurologist Raichle also followed this method in his own studies, after a while the person he studied Some parts of his brain are active even when he is doing nothing noticed.

Moreover, these regions lost activity when the brain focused on an external task.

Whenever one is not interested in anything externally, then Some parts of the brain became active again. Raichle defined this state of the brain as a negative task and predicted that these task regions were responsible for resting the brain.

However, the neurologist still continued his studies on negative duty zones and asked trial participants to close their eyes and relax during the scan. The results Raichle reached were quite surprising.

Negative task zones activated during rest, It was using much more energy than the rest of the brain. The neurologist then called this activity the default mode of brain function.

Additionally, a team from the Stanford School of Medicine discovered that this negative task activity creates a coherent network of interacting brain regions.

This discovery of the neurologist and the team became one of the first brain networks identified and this network affected various regions of the brain. These regions were also associated with memory, prediction, action evaluation, experience repetition, and reward/punishment actions.

The functions of this network have attracted great attention from the medical world over time, and neuroscientists have in the absence of an externally focused task, began to question what the brain was doing. So, it became a matter of curiosity what our brain was doing when we were not doing anything.

At this point, some researchers argue that the main function of the default mode network is daydreaming and mind wandering He claimed that it was, but there were also different opinions. For example, our mind could be traveling with past memories thanks to this network, or our brain could be controlling the flow of consciousness thanks to this network.

But these different views also caused confusion.

Because various dysfunctions in the default mode network have been discovered in many may trigger psychiatric and neurological disorders and it turns out that they may even have root causes.

Actually the default mode network is basically; remembering past experiences, imagining the future, mind wandering, it was performing the tasks of thinking about the mental state of others and processing language.

In fact, although these tasks seem quite unrelated to each other at first, scientists have found that all these functions, an inner whole He claimed that he could create it.

In short, the default mode network allowed us to think about who we are in our relationships with others and create a coherent self-narrative. Even even recognizing our own voice and face, We can say we owe it to the default mode network.

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