Science · Self · 2001
The Work of Rest
A brain at rest, eyes closed, is not a blank. A network that quiets when a task begins is named a default.
- Washington University, St. Louis
- Early twenty-first-century neuroimaging
- 38.64°N 90.31°W
Plate · Generated interpretation
Eyes closed. Is rest an absence of work, or another kind of work?
Listen · Eve
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Marcus E. Raichle and colleagues, “A Default Mode of Brain Function,” PNAS 98 (16 January 2001). PET measures of oxygen extraction. A set of regions decreases during goal-directed tasks and is therefore a candidate baseline. Later work names a default mode network and links it, controversially, to mind-wandering and self.
Raichle et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 98 (2001): 676–682. Gusnard et al., same year, on medial prefrontal activity and self-referential thought. The leap from a metabolic baseline to “the self” is a later popular move.
The paper is about a physiological default, not a metaphysical one. To say the self is the default mode is like saying weather is a barometer. That swap is not in the paper.
Rest is a kind of work in the brain. That is evidence. It is not a proof that daydream is the truth of the person.
What a person is doing when the task network quiets is not given by the quieting.
Distant echoes
Echo
Gilded Age America · Cambridge, Massachusetts
The stream
James watched thought arrive without a task. Raichle watched blood when the task stopped. Not one stream.
One question remains
Self · Who or what is having the experience?
If rest has a pattern, is the self what remains when we stop, or only what the scanner is built to notice then?