Mary Helen Immordino-Yang Joanna A. Christodoulou Vanessa Singh 2012

Default Mode Network

• spontaneously induced during rest, daydreaming, and nonattentive awake mental states
• implications for active internally focused mental processing
  • personal memory recall
  • imagining future
  • moral judgments
  • processing emotions
• inadequate opportunities for DMN functioning may have neg consequences for social-emotional wellbeing
• goal-directed tasks having to do with introspection, socioemotional, and self-referential processes of simulation

Paper Goals

a) intro to brain/mind functioning during attention laps b) hypothesize negative effects of high external attention demands (for children) c) provide examples connecting this hypothesis to dev/edu research d) advocate for educational practices that balance internal and external reflection

Neural systems of Attention

"task-positive" or "looking out" system

• Associated with active engagement
• goal-directed tasks
• attention to the external world

"task-negative" or "resting" or "looking in"

• default mode network
• passive attention
• internally focused

These two networks are incongruent: while one is engaged, the other is disengaged They are also codependent: functioning in one is correlated with functioning in another

Atypical DM Function

• associated with
  • schizophrenia
  • autism
  • ADD
  • anxiety disorders
  • depression

The differences in DM functioning among these populations seem to relate consistently to the hallmark symptoms of the disorder.

DMN and cognitive functioning

• intelligence - high DM connectivity during rest is associated with high IQ
• reading - segregation during rest between DM and reading processes in other parts of the brain is associated with greater reading ability
• memory - deactivation between DM during recall and encoding is associated with greater long term memory

Summary:

the neuroscience findings reviewed here suggest that (a) the quality of neural processing that supports the system for “looking out” is tied to the quality of neural processing that supports the system for “looking in” and to individuals’ abilities to move between these two modes efficiently; (b) the quality of neural processing during “looking in” is related to socioemotional functioning as well as to other dimensions of thought that transcend the “here and now.”

What the mind does at rest?

• introspection
• judgments about psychological traits and emotional qualities or self and close others
• self-awareness
• autobiographical self
• personal/episodic memory retrieval
• moral judgments

"Looking in"

...the more DM activity the participant will later show when feeling emotions with moral connotations in the MRI scanner, and the stronger the participant’s DM connectivity during rest

What does this mean for children?

The authors argue that even though we don't have causal evidence the development of DMN will lead to higher internal reflection (associated with DM) than better cognitive functioning (both socioemotional and academic).

I personally do not see enough evidence here that increase DMN time for children will actually improve their lives. In fact, there is research that shows connections between DMN and unhappiness and depression even in children. The full extent of these cognitive/neurological processes have not been explored, so to jump to interventions seem premature.

Considering the neural and psychological evidence together suggests that adequate developmental opportunity for appropriate lapses in outwardly directed attention, and potentially even for high-quality introspective states, may be important for wellbeing and for optimal performance on focused tasks, as the quality of thought during “looking in” and “looking out” may be interdependent.

Social media/technology may be eating up our DMN time

In the end other authors do call for more research on this, but they do so in an overly optimistic light, without accounting for the less sanguine research on DMN.