Mindfulness Researchers Have the Wrong Brain Villain

Mindfulness science went looking for the source of human suffering. It arrested the wrong suspect.

- “A wandering mind is an unhappy mind.” — Killingsworth & Gilbert

- The default mode network is “the narrator who won’t stop talking.” — Judson Brewer

- Psychedelic “ego-dissolution” tracks the disintegration of the default mode network — Robin Carhart-Harris

- "All these thoughts and feelings may be the products of an overactive default mode network, that tightly linked set of brain structures implicated in rumination, self-referential thought, and metacognition—thinking about thinking."— Michael Pollan

HATERS GONNA HATE.

And reader — to borrow a phrase from Michael Jordan: I took it personally.

I’m a creativity researcher who has spent years studying the upside of the wandering mind — positive-constructive daydreaming: the playful, exploratory, future-oriented inner life that fuels imagination and insight. And Jerome L. Singer, the “father of daydreaming” who pioneered that whole line of work, became a close personal friend and sat on my dissertation committee. He is, I’m quite sure, rolling in his grave every time he hears a mindfulness researcher hate on the cognitive machinery behind daydreaming.

So when the field brandishes the brain network behind all of that as the prime suspect in human misery? I have SO MUCH to freaking say about this one. If I sound super-duper passionate in a way some of my other posts maybe don’t sound, well, that’s just the truth of how I am feeling about this topic!

They’ve got the wrong villain.

Meet the accused

The “default mode network” (as cognitive neuroscientists like to call it) is the system that’s most active when you turn inward — when you stop chasing an external goal and start to drift, remember something personal, imagine your personal future, reflect, and wonder. The textbooks file it under “task-negative,” as if it only switches on when nothing important is happening. I’ve spent my career arguing the exact opposite, which is why I call it the Imagination Network: because what it’s doing is anything but nothing!

Here’s the résumé of the accused — the actual jobs this “villain” performs:

• It writes your story. It builds your autobiographical memory and stitches it into the running internal narrative that makes you you across time.

• It travels through time. It lets you step out of the present to imagine your future self, rehearse your goals, and run the “what if” scenarios that planning a life requires.

• It reads other minds. It’s the seat of perspective-taking, empathy, and theory of mind — how you climb out of your own head and into someone else’s, modeling what another person thinks, wants, and feels.

• It incubates your best ideas — and powers creative flow. Daydreaming and mind-wandering, its signature activities, are essential creative insights. And when you drop into creative flow— improvising, generating, making without self-conscious effort — this network is right there, driving the spontaneous, self-generated stream that flow is made of.

• It can work in cooperation with other brain networks. In research I’ve published with Roger Beaty, creativity depends on this network coupling with the brain’s executive-control system — the dreaming and the steering, firing together to turn an inner vision into a meaningful creative result.

Now read that list again. These are not idle defaults or bugs to be patched out. In my view, they are the soul of human existence! They are the most personal functions we have — the very machinery of selfhood: who you’ve been, who you might still become, how you reach other people, what you create. Strip them away and there’s no inner life left to speak of. They are, in the most literal sense, essential to self-actualization itself.

And here’s the part the mindfulness zealots keep missing: the network they smear as the self-absorbed “me” network is also the “us” network. Perspective-taking, empathy, connecting, inhabiting another person’s mind — that’s the same machinery. What the mindfulness researchers view as self-obsession is the very faculty that lets you get out of yourself and into someone else. It’s not just how we daydream. It’s how we connect — and how we love.

This brain network is irreducibly personal and contextual — built from your memories, your people, your imagined future, and meaningful only in the situation you’re actually in. There’s no universal verdict to hand down on a network that is, by definition, about you. Which is exactly what makes “just turn it down” such a category error.

That is not the résumé of a villain. That’s the résumé of the most human part of the human brain.

The real culprit was never the network

So why does the network keep showing up at the scene of every crime? Because it also hosts rumination — the stuck, repetitive, self-attacking loop where the same dark thought circles the drain for the hundredth time. Rumination is real, and it is genuinely a source of suffering.

But here’s the irony I learned the hard way on the cushion: rumination isn’t even really wandering. When you ruminate, your mind isn’t roaming free — it’s locked in, grinding one groove, doing the precise opposite of what an unleashed imagination does. So rumination is one mode of the Imagination Network that got stuck on another network (such as the amygdala), not the network itself.

The science actually backs this up if you read past the headlines. “A wandering mind is an unhappy mind” turned out to be far more nuanced than the title promised: whether mind-wandering lifts or sinks your mood depends on its content and type. Spontaneous, negative, can’t-stop-it wandering hurts. Deliberate, prospective, playful wandering — the kind that solves problems in the shower and writes the next paragraph for you — helps.

The crime isn’t wandering. It’s getting trapped in your wanderings, and losing the freedom to wander back out.

The irony that gives the whole thing away

Here’s the part I find almost funny. The people prosecuting the Imagination Network keep, in the same breath, marveling at its gifts.

Robin Carhart-Harris’s own data describes the psychedelic state as a wider, more flexible, dreamlike repertoire of mind — an “entropic brain” overflowing with novel connections. That is not the absence of the imagination network’s contribution. That’s imagination, unleashed.

And Pollan? For most of How to Change Your Mind, the default mode network is the ego to be vanquished — he credits it with mental time-travel and the very sense of self, then celebrates the dissolution of his own ego, on psilocybin and toad venom alike, as the breakthrough: I dissolved my ego and found God. In his last chapter (a point in which I chucked my Kindle into the ocean), Pollan closes with a coda titled “Going to Meet My Default Mode Network,” in which he straps on a 128-electrode cap in Judson Brewer’s lab to drive down activity in his posterior cingulate cortex — a major hub of the Imagination Network. The triumphant finish? Recalling a psychedelic vision of his ego as an empty steel pylon drifting away, he sends the readout plunging below baseline and signs off “squinting to make out something wondrous.” The whole arc of the book seems to point to this defining moment where he considers the whole journey a success because he silenced his Imagination Network!

Brewer describes that exact brain region as the place where we “take something personally” — the brain’s “But enough about you” center. So the field’s most beloved narrator goes looking for transcendence by switching off the part of his brain that takes things personally. Reader, you already know how I took that. As I’ve argued repeatedly, a strong sense of self is a very different thing than a strong ego. You can have a quiet ego and maintain a strong sense of who you are, what you value, and who you wish to become.

And what’s the deal with his epilogue?! The richest irony: in his epilogue titled In Praise of Neural Diversity, he gives a plea to value many modes of mind. Which is, of course, my whole point. They are all standing over the thing they claim to have defeated, in awe of everything it gave them. After nearly four hundred pages prosecuting the default mode network, Pollan ends the book in rapture over a sustained mental space where ideas drift in and out and “you can launch a topic or change it, like a channel” — a state in which, he admits, “the ego is not entirely absent” and “a certain kind of mental work is getting done,” one that keeps handing him “usable ideas, images, or metaphors.” He calls it “one of the great gifts” of the whole journey.

Folks: that’s positive-constructive daydreaming!!!! That’s the Imagination Network, doing the very thing I’ve spent my career documenting. He demonizes it for nearly four hundred pages, then ends his book in awe of it.

You don’t have to dissolve the imagination to be free. You have to free it.

To be fair to the prosecution

I’m not here to tell you meditation doesn’t work. Meditation can be deeply meaningful and transformative. I’m a regular mindfulness meditation practitioner myself. I did the full eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course, sat about forty minutes a day, and came away genuinely changed: my grip on my own anxiety loosened, and I wrote up the whole journey as a skeptic who became convinced in the merits of a regular mindfulness practice.

The benefits are real, and meditation is excellent training for the executive attention network— the brain’s ability to flexibly control one’s attention. But the single deepest thing I learned on the cushion is the very point of this essay: mindfulness is not the opposite of mind-wandering.

If that sounds like a contradiction — a meditator defending the very network meditation is supposed to quiet — it isn’t. It’s a yes/and. A regular meditation practice doesn’t delete the imagination network; it tunes it, calming the self-critical, ruminative parts while leaving the imaginative ones free to roam. Regulation isn’t suppression — it’s the freedom to choose when to focus and when to wander.

My quarrel is with the story: the triumphalist framing that the default mode network is the enemy of a good life, the thing to suppress, dissolve, or “defeat.” (I’ve made this case to Jud Brewer directly more than once, and I’ll happily keep making it.) Because here’s what that story misses.

It’s the integration, not the war

In a whole separate line of research, my colleagues and I have been showing that higher-level creative cognition requires a very strong integration between the executive attention network and the Imagination Network — the steering and the dreaming, firing together. Divergent thinking and openness to experience lean hard on Imagination Network processes: daydreaming, imagining the future, visualizing your future self, reaching back into your most personal memories. In our work, the Imagination Network isn’t the villain. It’s the hero!

The receipts, if you want them: default–executive coupling supports creative idea production (in Nature’s Scientific Reports); openness to experience and default-network efficiency; how eminent and non-eminent thinkers differ in brain activity and in large-scale network interactions during creative thought; brain morphometry and creative achievement; and Roger Beaty’s elegant recent work showing that “control-default hubs” act as an integrative core supporting complex cognition and creativity.

Put the two literatures in the same room and the resolution is obvious: the goal was never to crown one network the hero and the other the villain. It’s all about the integration.

And I suspect that’s the real reason the default mode network keeps getting cast as the enemy. Underneath the neuroscience sits an older ideology — that the self is the problem, and the destination is no self at all: dissolve the ego, silence the narrator, erase the “me.”

But run that program to completion and you don’t get a sage. You get a freaking zombie! No inner life, no rich imagination, no thoughts of the future, no contact with your own deepest memories, and no self left to actualize. Who, exactly, wants that? (The opposite extreme is no prize either: all imagination and no control is just aimless mind-wandering and that can certainly be quite frustrating.) The whole game is the two networks working together — and keeping the strong sense of self the mindfulness researchers seem so eager to delete.

Honestly, meditation researchers and creativity researchers should be running more studies together — instead of casting the same brain network as savior or saboteur depending on which conference they’re standing in.

A different goal

In my view, the aim of a life well-lived is not a quiet mind. It’s a free one — a mind that can drop fully into the present when the present is what’s called for, and roam the past, the future, and the wildly possible when that’s what’s called for, and move flexibly between the two.

So no — I won’t be “defeating” my default mode network. I’ll keep it, thank you very much! The rumination I’ll work on. The imagination I’m keeping for good.

The Imagination Network isn’t the villain of your inner life. It’s the protagonist.

P.S. I'm bringing my Columbia course, The Science of Living Well, to the public this summer — learn with me: scottbarrykaufman.com/livingwell.