Puttering around as a behavioral mode

Over the weekend I got to thinking about the activity of puttering around. I wondered whether or not there has been any formal study about. So I put the following prompt to ChatGPT 5.2:

I’ve talked a lot about DMF (default mode network) and mind wandering in connection with creativity. It seems to me that puttering around is in the same ballpark. I’m not thinking and pondering, but I’m doing stuff, rather casually and in no forced order. Just as things come. It seems I like to putter early in the morning, on Friday afternoon, and over the weekend. Thus I just spent two days puttering around.

Since I’ve not had a “day job” in years, the distinction between weekdays and weekends is not forced on me. Yet it remains with me. It structured by time for most of the year in primary and secondary school. A bit less so in undergraduate and graduate school, but still operative. It also functioned when I had a faculty position at RPI (1978-1985) and at those times later on when I had one of those day jobs. So, it’s become deeply internalized though no longer externally imposed.

Its response took the form of numbered headings, subheadings, and bulleted lists. I find that sometimes useful, sometimes annoying. Since I wanted to write it up in a blog post I asked ChatGPT to express that material in the form of expository prose. I’ve put its response below the asterisks.

* * * * *

I’ve been thinking about puttering—not thinking hard, not resting, but doing things casually and without a forced order. It feels important, especially in connection with creativity, but I don’t know of any literature that treats it directly. What follows is an attempt to make sense of that intuition.

Cognitive science has devoted enormous attention to the default mode network (DMN)—a set of brain regions that become active when we are not engaged in externally directed tasks. The DMN is associated with mind wandering, autobiographical memory, imaginative simulation, and creative recombination. It is usually contrasted with task-positive networks that dominate during focused, goal-directed work.

But this framing leaves out a familiar and, I suspect, crucial mode of everyday cognition: puttering around.

Puttering is not rest, and it is not deliberate thinking. It is also not task-oriented in any strong sense. When I am puttering, I am doing things—moving objects, skimming texts, opening files, following small curiosities—but without urgency, hierarchy, or a clear endpoint. Attention shifts as affordances present themselves. One thing leads to another, but nothing insists.

This matters because puttering is not simply mind wandering in the absence of action. It is mind wandering coupled to low-stakes activity. That coupling provides just enough structure to keep cognition anchored in the world, while leaving associative processes free to roam. In that sense, puttering is an enacted version of default-mode cognition.

Most DMN research is organized around a sharp contrast: rest versus task. Subjects lie still in scanners or perform narrowly defined activities. What rarely gets studied is the large middle ground—self-paced, low-demand activity where executive control is attenuated but not absent. Yet it is precisely in this middle ground that many creative insights seem to arise.

One way to think about puttering is as a form of foraging. Cognitive scientists have developed mathematical models of information foraging and semantic search, showing how minds move through memory spaces under conditions of weak constraint. But these models are typically abstract and disembodied. Puttering, by contrast, is foraging with hands, eyes, and objects. It is exploratory behavior distributed across mind and environment.

Embodied and enactive theories of cognition come closer to capturing this phenomenon. They emphasize that cognition is not confined to the head but unfolds through interaction with the world. Still, even here, the focus is often on skilled action or purposeful engagement. Puttering remains oddly invisible: too mundane, too informal, too unproductive by conventional standards.

Creativity research acknowledges something similar under the heading of incubation. We are told that stepping away from a problem can allow unconscious processes to reorganize it. But incubation is usually framed as a gap between periods of work, not as a mode of activity in its own right. Puttering is active incubation—ongoing, embodied, and temporally permissive.

Time matters here. Even though I no longer have a “day job,” I notice that puttering reliably emerges at certain times: early in the morning, Friday afternoons, weekends. These temporal zones were once imposed externally—by school schedules, academic calendars, workweeks—but they have become internalized. They now function as cognitive affordances. Certain kinds of thinking feel licensed in those periods, while others feel out of place.

That licensing effect is important. Puttering lowers internal monitoring and performance pressure. It delays premature optimization. It allows partially formed ideas to coexist without being forced into coherence too soon. In more technical terms, it increases associative bandwidth while keeping executive control at a minimum viable level. For someone with a large and densely connected memory base, that is a powerful configuration.

Modern work culture tends to suppress puttering. It valorizes focus, efficiency, and measurable output, leaving little room for loosely structured activity that may not immediately “pay off.” Ironically, many contemporary AI systems explicitly reintroduce formal analogues of puttering: stochastic sampling, random walks, background exploration, temperature-controlled search. We design machines to do what we often deny ourselves permission to do.

There is, as far as I know, no direct scientific literature on puttering around. Instead, it falls through the cracks between DMN research, embodied cognition, creativity studies, and ecological psychology. Yet that absence is revealing. Puttering occupies a cognitive regime that our current conceptual frameworks do not handle well: neither rest nor work, neither task nor distraction, but something quietly generative in between.

If that is right, then puttering is not a failure of discipline or a lapse in productivity. It is a mode of cognition in its own right—one that deserves recognition, protection, and perhaps eventually, study. 

* * * * *

Note, however, that I did not explicitly ask it to write as my voice. As you can see, though, that's what it did. Oh well.

Alison Gopnik, a conversation with Tyler Cowen (children as scientist, Freud & Piaget, AI)

Tyler Cowen, Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture (Ep. 265), Conversations with Tyler, Dec. 17, 2025.

The introduction:

Alison Gopnik is both a psychologist and philosopher at Berkeley, studying how children construct theories of the world from limited data. Her central insight is that babies learn like scientists, running experiments and updating beliefs based on evidence. But Tyler wonders: are scientists actually good learners? It’s a question that leads them into a wide-ranging conversation about what we’ve been systematically underestimating in young minds, what’s wrong with simple nature-versus-nurture frameworks, and whether AI represents genuine intelligence or just a very sophisticated library.

Tyler and Alison cover how children systematically experiment on the world and what study she’d run with $100 million, why babies are more conscious than adults and what consciousness even means, episodic memory and aphantasia, whether Freud got anything right about childhood and what’s held up best from Piaget, how we should teach young children versus school-age kids, how AI should change K-12 education and Gopnik’s case that it’s a cultural technology rather than intelligence, whether the enterprise of twin studies makes sense and why she sees nature versus nurture as the wrong framework entirely, autism and ADHD as diagnostic categories, whether the success of her siblings belies her skepticism about genetic inheritance, her new project on the economics and philosophy of caregiving, and more.

Kids as Scientists:

We have some good computational models of how scientific theory change works. It turns out that those apply to children as well. The specific thing that I’ve looked at is, what is it that scientists do? Here’s this big, hard problem. All we seem to get from the world are a bunch of photons at the back of our retina and disturbances of air in our ears, and yet, children know about people and things, and scientists know about quarks and quantum phenomena. How do we ever get from the data to the theory?

One subcategory of that is, how do we ever get causal structure which is so important in science? How do we ever figure out what causes what just from a bunch of data that we have?

What’s happened is that philosophers of science and computer scientists have found some systematic ways that you could talk about that. Scientists — I think, mostly, not necessarily consciously, but just as part of what they do — and little kids are looking at data and systematically figuring out what kind of structure out there in the world could have caused this pattern of data. That’s not the only thing, of course, that’s going on in science. There’re lots of other things, too, but it’s at least one central thing going on in science that we’ve started to really understand. [...]

If you asked a three-year-old, “Do you think that this pattern of conditional dependencies is giving you a confounding causal structure?” They would probably not give you a very sensible answer. Even when you ask scientists that, they don’t give you a very sensible answer. But when you look at their actual practice, what you see is that, in fact, kids, for example, are Bayesian, and so are scientists.

Now, the thing is that, in fact, in many respects, kids are better Bayesians than scientists, but a lot of it depends on your prior. If you have, as they say, a very peaked prior, you have a lot of experience, you have a lot of reason to believe that this prior assumption is right, then it’s rational not to change it when you just have a little bit of evidence. You should require a lot of evidence to overturn something that you have a lot of confirmation for.

It’s interesting that the kids, actually, are better at solving problems that involve unusual outcomes than the scientists are. I think what happens in science — we’ve just been doing some work about this — is that there’s also a social factor, where having a big distribution of people who are more likely to go with the prior versus people who are more likely to go with the evidence, which seems to be true in science, that collectively can get you to the right answer. There’s no arbitrary principle you can have about when should you abandon the theory and when should you hold onto it. [...]

One thing you can do, which is like what you’re describing about the money supply, is just make little changes to what you already know. That’s what you mean about moving in the predictable direction. You’re just changing things a little bit. Then seeing, “Okay, if I change it a little bit, is it doing a better job of accounting for the data?” That’s what people think of as a low-temperature search. The other kind of search you can do, the high-temperature search, is just bounce around the space. Try wild, crazy things. Exactly as you were saying, have just a more random walk.

The strategy that you see in computer science, this annealing, is start out with this wild, crazy, out-of-the-box, high-temperature search through the space, and then cool off and just fill in the details. If you think about your four-year-old, who do they sound like? Do they sound like the creature that’s just moving a little bit, or do they sound like they’re noisy and bouncy and random and doing all sorts of weird things? The four-year-old seemed to be a really good idea of this kind of random search. [...]

I think you see both things happening. When you get big paradigm shifts, as Kuhn said, when you get big changes in science, a lot of times it’s because someone found an idea that looked like it was improbable. The nice thing about kids is, because they don’t have to worry about grant proposals, they can be off in the wild space all the time.

[...]

With scientists, we underestimate how much that — we sometimes dismissively call it a fishing expedition — how much that very general experimentation is playing a role in scientific progress. In the grant, you’re supposed to say, “Here’s my three hypotheses, and here are the four experiments I’m going to do to test them.” But I think in practice, a lot of times, scientists are being like the little boy with the avocado and the spoon. They’re saying, “I don’t know, what will happen if I try this? What will happen if I try that?” Then they write the grant to get money to do the things that they’ve already done by doing all these experiments.

FWIW, I've known about simulated annealing for years, a couple of decades at least. For awhile I was one of my go-to metaphors/analogies, though I've not used it recently. In terms that I've been developing in other posts and in some working papers, high-temperature search is ludic (Homo Ludens) while low-temperature filling-in-the details is economic (Home Economicus).

LLMs tend to be used in economic ways. All those benchmarks are based on specific problems in well-specified domains. That's why they aren't particularly creative. My series of blog posts on humans in the loop contains case studies of three of my own ludic explorations.

Daydreaming is essential to creativity

The New York Times has a series of five articles on creativity (yay!), which I've not been following. Yeah, I doodle (day 1), lots, and, yes, I've written a poem or three (day 2), but daydreaming, that got my attention. I do it a lot, have been all my life. And I'm aware of the connection, not simply through my own experience, but through commentary on the default mode network in the brain, which is the daydreaming resting state. So....

Elizabeth Passarella, Day 3: Master the Art of Daydreaming, NYTimes, June 4, 2025.

Sometimes, I miss my subway stop. But on the whole, daydreaming is a positive thing, a portal to more happiness and innovative thinking. We could probably be getting more out of it, though, said Madeleine Gross, a research scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who studies curiosity and creativity. “Our minds wander for a substantial portion of the day, and we’re often passive passengers,” she said. “That feels like a missed opportunity.”

People who are inherently creative tend to daydream more. Higher rates of daydreaming go hand in hand with performing well on divergent thinking tasks, Dr. Gross said. [...]

But it works both ways. “Daydreaming can also make you more creative,” she said. The key is following a few rules. That might sound nuts — it’s daydreaming! — but think about how often your mind wanders right to your stressful to-do list. [...] Research shows that taking time away from a problem to let your thoughts “incubate” in the background can prompt surprising solutions.

The article ends with and exercise in intentional daydreaming. If this all seems strange to you then give it a try.

In Search of Awesome

Ashley Stimpson, Awestruck, Johns Hopkins Magazine, Winter 2023.

The tricky thing about emotions is they're difficult to measure; no one feels 87% happy or 15 kilograms of sadness. A decade ago, scientists measured awe by asking people, simply, if they felt it. The problem with that, according to Yaden, is that "different people have different definitions of the emotion."

So, Yaden assembled a team of researchers to develop a robust way to measure awe.

First, the team scoured previous scientific studies to come up with six core characteristics of the emotion: self-diminishment, time alteration, physical sensations like chills, and a feeling of connectedness, as well as the perception of vastness and the struggle to comprehend it.

Some background:

Awe has gone by a number of names. Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant both wrote about the sublime, while Charles Darwin expounded on wonder. Abraham Maslow introduced the idea of "peak experiences," which he described as "exciting, oceanic, deeply moving, exhilarating, elevating," which is to say: awesome.

Yet, in the early 1990s, when influential psychologist Paul Ekman identified the six basic human emotions (joy, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, and surprise), awe was not on the list. It was one of Ekman's students, Dacher Keltner, who brought awe into the scientific conversation.

Keltner, a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life (Penguin Press, January 2023), says he was immersed in awe from a young age, at art museums and on camping trips with his parents. "My dad is a visual artist. My mom taught Romanticism and poetry. I grew up at a really wild time, in Laurel Canyon in the 1960s. So I was always walking around just kind of awe-struck."

Awe is good:

In the meantime, the science of awe has proliferated. Research has shown that people who feel awe more often report higher rates of satisfaction with life and greater feelings of well-being. Awe can help us be less stressed, less materialistic, and less isolated. There's evidence that awe is good for our physical health, too; one study reported that people who experienced the emotion more often had lower levels of cytokines, the proteins that cause inflammation. Awe might also contribute to a more harmonious society. When researchers exposed one group of study participants to an awe-inspiring view of towering eucalyptus trees, and another group to a neutral scene of a building, those who admired the pretty view were more likely to help a stranger pick up something they had dropped afterward. Another study found that awe made people less aggressive.

Nixing the default mode:

There's evidence that awe deactivates what's called the default mode network—the part of the brain associated with self-perception—allowing us to step outside our insular thoughts and ruminations and be wholly present in the moment. Awe also activates the vagus nerves, a braid of nerves running from the brain to the large intestines that is associated with feelings of compassion and altruism. In short, the emotion turns our focus away from ourselves, "providing connectedness and perspective," Yaden says. "Suddenly, our problems no longer feel as big and daunting."

The eight wonders of life:

In a study to determine what causes people to feel awe, Keltner and a research team gathered narratives about the emotion from 26 countries around the world. "Write about a time your mind was blown," he and his collaborators instructed. Using these accounts, Keltner developed what he calls the eight wonders of life: moral beauty, nature, collective movement, music, art, spirituality, big ideas, and mortality. Incorporating these wonders into your life to experience awe is "strikingly easy," Keltner says. In fact, you're probably already doing it.

"Most people experience awe pretty regularly," echoes Yaden. "Most vacations include awe excursions. People climb to the top of mountains, they go to museums, they visit monuments."

There's more at the link.

A quick remark on so-called “hallucinations” in LLMs and humans

That LLMs “hallucinate” is well-known, though I prefer the term “confabulate.” They just make stuff up. They don’t do it intentionally, or with intent to deceive. They do it because they have no connection to “ground truth.” They don’t even know what such a thing is, not really, though I’m sure, if asked, ChatGPT would say something reasonable about the idea.

What LLMs have, loosely speaking, is an ontology. They ‘know’ what kinds of things exist. As Immanuel Kant pointed out in connection with the ontological argument for the existence of god, existence is not a predicate. When an LLM responds to a prompt, its response is consistent with the ontology it has internalized. If phenomena in its response happen to be true of the world, that’s incidental, though convenient for users.

What’s implicit in this conversation is an assumption that humans do not confabulate, that we can and so talk about reality. I think that’s true, sorta’, but misleading. Yes, we often anchor our statements in reality, as best we can do in the situation. And, yes, we can also deliberately side-step such anchoring. We do this when telling fictional stories without intention to deceive; in this situation we assert that the story is about imagined event. And we can also make things up with deceptive intent.

Nonetheless, I believe that our “natural” linguistic mode is just making things up, confabulation it you will. But we are surrounded by others and have to interact with them. One way to communicate effectively is to anchor our language in external events, in things others can readily observe, in reality, as we like to say. Such anchoring is not necessary for speech, but it is useful when conversing with others.

In this connection I think it’s worth noting that, for a number of years, neuroscientists have been investigating the brain structures that are most active when we’re doing nothing in particular, when we’re letting our mind wander. In that state we may attended to some external event one moment, scratch our back the next, think about that summer’s day three years ago, and so forth. We day dream. What do you think they call that conglomeration of neural structures? They call it the default mode network (DFM). If you give a verbal report of what’s passing by during a day dream, a lot of that is going to be confabulation. It’s just the way we are.

Homework assignment 1: Explicate Descartes’ worries about being deceived by a malignant being in these terms.

Homework assignment 2: Now consider what happens during sensory deprivation.

Ramble on STUFF: intelligence, simulation, AI, doom, default mode, the usual

Time for another one of these. Lots on my mind. Difficult to sort it out. So, some quick hits just to get them all into the same space.

The discourse of intelligence

As far as I can tell the notion of intelligence that’s instantiated in such phrases as “intelligent life” or “artificial intelligence” is relatively new, dating back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the emergence of tests to estimate general cognitive capacity, that is, intelligence, as in “intelligence quotient.” This conception is pervasive in the modern world. It pervades the educational system and our discourse on race and public policy, including eugenics. AI seems to be a cross between this idea and computation, the idea and its realization in digital computers.

How does this discourse show up in fiction? I’m thinking of such characters as Sherlock Holms or, much more recently, Adrian Monk? These characters are noted for their intelligence, but are otherwise odd and in Monk’s case, extremely odd. 

Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis seems very thin to me

The more I think about it, it is not at all clear just what he means by simulation. He focuses on human experience. But what about animals? They are part of human experience. Are animals just empty shells, existing only as appearances for humans. But what about their interactions with one another? What drives their actions? Are they (quasi) automatous agents or are their actions entirely subordinate to the mechanisms which present appearances to humans? What happens when animals or humans reproduce? Do we have simulated DNA, fertilization, embryonic development? That seems to be rather granular and would impose a heavy computational burden. But if the simulation doesn’t do that, then how are the characteristics of the offspring related to those of its parents? What mechanism is used of that? Lots of problems.

Other posts on the simulation argument.

Performance and competence in AI test-taking

https://rodneybrooks.com/the-seven-deadly-sins-of-predicting-the-future-of-ai/ Rodney Brooks has introduced a distinction between competence and performance into his ongoing discussion of AI. It is common to benchmark large language models on standardized tests given to humans, such as advanced placement (AP) tests or professional qualification tests (e.g. bar exams. Those are expressions of performance. What underlying competencies can we validly infer from those performances? In particular, are they similar to the competencies we infer about humans from those tests. Given that both a human and an LLM score at a certain level on the AP physics exam, is the LLM’s underlying competence in physics comparable to the human’s?

Super-intelligence

It’s a vague notion, no? In chess, computers have had the advantage over humans for a decade and a half, but that’s not quite what we mean by superintelligence (SI), is it? Too specialized. When talking of SI we mean general intelligence, no? LLMs such as GPT-4 and Claude-2 have a much broader range of knowledge than any human. Super-intelligence? In a way ‘yes,’ but probably no, not really.

Geoffrey Hinton has imagined an intelligence that exceeds human intelligence by as much as human intelligence exceeds a frog’s. This trope is common enough, and easy enough to cough-up. But what does it mean? There is a sense in which a contemporary Harvard graduate is a superintelligence with respect to a well-educated person of the 17th century or, for that matter, ancient Greece or Rome. That Harvard graduate understands things which are would be unintelligible to those earlier people – Mark Twain used this (kind of) disparity as a theme for a book, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

Note that, no matter how a frog is raised and ‘educated,’ it will never have the mental capacities of a human. But, if you took an infant from the 17th century and time-traveled it into the contemporary world, it could become a Harvard graduate. When talking of a future computational superintelligence, which of these disparities (frog vs. human, 17th C. vs. now) are we talking about. Maybe both?

How does superintelligence develop? Through thought alone or does it interact with the world? I fear this could go on and on.

Why’d Time print Yudkowsky’s essay?

I was shocked when Time Magazine published Eliezer Yudkowsky’s essay at the end of March. Why? Yudkowsky’s vision of AI Doom strikes me as being mostly a creature of science fiction rather than being a plausible hypothesis about the future of AI. I didn’t think Time was in the business of publishing science fiction.

So, I was wrong about something. I’ve got to revise some priors, as the Bayesians say. But which ones, and how? For the moment I see no reason to revise my thoughts about AI existential risk. Which implies that I was wrong about Time, which I regard as a bastion of middle-brow opinion.

But, really, just what does extinction-via-AI really mean to that audience? Of course, people fear job loss, that’s been around since, like, forever. And now we’ve got crazy behavior from LLMs. My guess is that AI Doom is continuous with and an intensification of those fears. Nothing special.

Why doom, after all? (a search for the real?)

Why is AI doom such a compelling idea to some people, particularly those in high tech? What problem does it solve for them? Well, since it is an idea about the future, and pretty much the whole future at that, let’s posit that that’s the problem it solves: How do with think about the future? Posit the emergence of (a godlike) superintelligence that is so powerful that it can exert almost totally control over human life. Further posit that, for whatever reason, it decides that humankind is expendable. However, if – and it’s a BIG IF – we can exert control over this superintelligence (‘alignment’), so that we can control it, then WE ARE IN CONTROL of the future.

Problem solved.

But why not just assume that we will be able to control this thing – as Yann LeCun seems to assume? Because that doesn't give us much guidance about what to do. If we can control this thing, whatever it is, then the future is wide open. Anything is possible. That’s no way to focus our efforts. But if it IS out to get us, that gives a pretty strong focus for our activity.

Do I believe this? How would I know? I just made it up.

Confabulation & default mode

One well-known problem for LLMs is that they tend to make things about. Well, it’s struck me that confabulation is the default mode for human mentation as well. What passes through your mind when you aren’t doing anything in particular, when you’re daydreaming? Some of those fleeting thoughts may be anchored in reality, but many will not be, many will be fabulation of one kind or another.

Neuroscientists have been examining brain activation during that activity. They’ve identified a distinct configuration of brain structures that supports it. This has been called the default mode network.

Hmmmm....

What is REALITY anyhow?

Indeed. More and more reality is seeming rather fluid. As David Hays and I remarked in, A Note on Why Natural Selection Leads to Complexity, Reality is not perceived, it is enacted – in a universe of great, perhaps unbounded, complexity.

Take a break, it's good for the mind [naps!]

A.C. Shilton, How to Tell If Your Brain Needs a Break, NYTimes, Feb. 3, 2022.

It’s 1:02 p.m. Do you know what your brain is doing?

If the answer is trawling the bowels of the internet instead of finishing those spreadsheets, it might be time to step away from your desk. Brain slumps are real, said Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine. And the antidote to this midafternoon mind sludge isn’t muddling through, no matter what hustle culture wants you to believe. It’s the opposite: You should take a break.

“We can’t expect to lift weights nonstop all day, and we can’t expect to use sustained focus and attention for extended periods of time, either,” said Dr. Mark, author of “Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity.” While your brain is not a muscle, the analogy is a good one, since staying focused requires our brains to burn energy, said Marta Sabariego, an assistant professor at Mount Holyoke College who studies attention and other goal directed behaviors.

But the most compelling reason for taking a brain break is that it may improve your ability to do quality work.

As always, there's more at the link.

Me, I like to play a couple of rounds of solitaire.

Oh! I forgot: "Few workers have the option to take a midday nap, but if you do, take it." YES! Mid-afternoon or even mid-morning, too. Naps are good.

Remember the Sabbath...[a different world]

Ezra Klein, Sabbath and the Art of Rest, NYTimes, December 3, 2022. From the introduction:

Do we know how to truly rest? Who would we be if we did?

I’ve been wrestling with these questions since I read Abraham Joshua Heschel’s stunning book “The Sabbath” in college. The ancient Jewish ritual of the Sabbath reserves a full day per week for rest. As it’s commonly practiced, that means about 25 hours every week of no work, very little technology and plenty of in-person gathering.

But the Sabbath is a much more radical approach to rest than a simple respite from work and technology. Implicit in the practice of the Sabbath is a stinging critique of the speed at which we live our lives, the ways we choose to spend our time and how we think about the idea of rest itself. That, at least, is a central argument of Judith Shulevitz’s wonderful book, “The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time.”

Shulevitz is a longtime culture critic and currently a contributing writer for The Atlantic. Her book isn’t just about the Sabbath itself, it’s about the world the Sabbath tries to create: one with an entirely different conception of time, morality, rest and community. It’s the kind of world that is wholly different from our own, and one whose wisdom is urgently needed.

It is about engaging a different range of behavioral modes, ways the brain has of engaging us with the world. I suspect it engages the brain’s so-called default mode network, which is more dream-like, less driven, more social, more conducive to synching with others.

* * * * *

Addendum: Judith Shulevitz observes:

You are supposed to let your mind wander. We’ll gather, have a moment of just letting go. Not all the time, some of the time. But these are the positive things that the frame gives a special gloss to the way it does a work of art and says, this space here, it’s meaning. Make sense of it.

That's definitely the default mode network.

On the practical business of intimate intellectual collaboration, getting brains in synch

Mordechai Rorvig, The Computer Scientist Who Parlays Failures Into Breakthroughs, Quanta Magazine, June 13, 2022:

Why do you think your collaborations with Teng were so successful?

When I was starting grad school at MIT, he was an instructor there. We started working on problems then and had a very compatible working style. You’ll notice I have a couch in my office. In my office at MIT I had two couches. That meant Shang-Hua and I could both work — like, literally just spend all day lying down thinking about something, and when you have an idea, get up and talk about it. He was very happy to spend a lot of time thinking about things and talking about problems. Like me, he was happy to work on absurdly hard problems that we probably wouldn’t solve. Failure was the standard result of anything that we worked on, even if we were working on it for years. But that was OK.

David Hays and I did something similar:

This ritual began when both of us were exhausted from the intellectual work, and frustrated because we weren’t making progress. Each of us would lie back and drop into fitful reverie. Every so often one of us would make a comment or ask a question. The other would reply, to no mutual satisfaction, and the fitful reverie would continue. Eventually we would work through it, begin talking and talking, and Dave would sit down to the computer and write up some notes on what we had accomplished.

I suspect this involves relaxing into a mental mode where the brain's so-called default mode network is regnant.

Neural signature of attentional engagement to narratives

Using narrative data shared by @kanileke and @esfinn (🙌 open science!), we showed that participants were more engaged during emotional moments of the narratives. FMRI activity in the default mode network was more synchronized across people at these engaging moments. 2/4

— Hayoung Song (@HayoungSong5) August 13, 2021

We send immense 🙏 to @kanileke, @HassonLab, @andyheusser, @paxt0n4, @jeremyRmanning, @bttyeo, @the_mindwanders for their inspirational work and sharing data/code, @JeongjunPark2 for helpful feedback all the way, and anonymous reviewers for great suggestions. 4/4

— Hayoung Song (@HayoungSong5) August 13, 2021

Alison Gopnik on children, exploration, play and AI [R&D at the skunkworks]

Ezra Klein interviews psychologist Alison Gopnik, Why Adults Lose the ‘Beginner’s Mind’, NYTimes, April 16, 2021.

Children as explorers:

Klein: You write that children aren’t just defective adults, primitive grown-ups, who are gradually attaining our perfection and complexity. Instead, children and adults are different forms of Homo sapiens. How so?

Gopnik: Well, from an evolutionary biology point of view, one of the things that’s really striking is this relationship between what biologists call life history, how our developmental sequence unfolds, and things like how intelligent we are. And there’s a very, very general relationship between how long a period of childhood an organism has and roughly how smart they are, how big their brains are, how flexible they are. And an idea that I think a lot of us have now is that part of that is because you’ve really got these two different creatures. So you’ve got one creature that’s really designed to explore, to learn, to change. That’s the child form. And then you’ve got this other creature that’s really designed to exploit, as computer scientists say, to go out, find resources, make plans, make things happen, including finding resources for that wild, crazy explorer that you have in your nursery. And the idea is that those two different developmental and evolutionary agendas come with really different kinds of cognition, really different kinds of computation, really different kinds of brains, and I think with very different kinds of experiences of the world. So, the very way that you experience the world, your consciousness, is really different if your agenda is going to be, get the next thing done, figure out how to do it, figure out what the next thing to do after that is, versus extract as much information as I possibly can from the world. And I think adults have the capacity to some extent to go back and forth between those two states. But I think that babies and young children are in that explore state all the time. That’s really what they’re designed to do. They’re like a different kind of creature than the adult. You sort of might think about, well, are there other ways that evolution could have solved this explore, exploit trade-off, this problem about how do you get a creature that can do things, but can also learn things really widely? And Peter Godfrey-Smith’s wonderful book — I’ve just been reading “Metazoa” — talks about the octopus. And the octopus is very puzzling because the octos don’t have a long childhood. And yet, they seem to be really smart, and they have these big brains with lots of neurons. But it also turns out that octos actually have divided brains. So they have one brain in the center in their head, and then they have another brain or maybe eight brains in each one of the tentacles. And if you actually watch what the octos do, the tentacles are out there doing the explorer thing.

States of consciousness:

Klein: And is that the dynamic that leads to this spotlight consciousness, lantern consciousness distinction? And can you talk about that? Because I know I think about it all the time.

Gopnik: So those are two really, really different kinds of consciousness. One kind of consciousness — this is an old metaphor — is to think about attention as being like a spotlight. It comes in. It illuminates the thing that you want to find out about. And you don’t see the things that are on the other side. And I think that in other states of consciousness, especially the state of consciousness you’re in when you’re a child — but I think there are things that adults do that put them in that state as well — you have something that’s much more like a lantern. So you’re actually taking in information from everything that’s going on around you. And the most important thing is, is this going to teach me something? Is this new? Is this interesting? Is this curious, rather than focusing your attention and consciousness on just one thing at a time. [...] think about when you’re completely absorbed in a really interesting movie. You’re kind of gone. Your self is gone. You’re not deciding what to pay attention to in the movie. The movie is just completely captivating. In the state of that focused, goal-directed consciousness, those frontal areas are very involved and very engaged. And there seem to actually be two pathways. One of them is the one that’s sort of here’s the goal-directed pathway, what they sometimes call the task dependent activity. And then the other one is what’s sometimes called the default mode. And that’s the sort of ruminating or thinking about the other things that you have to do, being in your head, as we say, as the other mode. When you look at someone who’s in the scanner, who’s really absorbed in a great movie, neither of those parts are really active. And instead, other parts of the brain are more active. And that brain, the brain of the person who’s absorbed in the movie, looks more like the child’s brain.

Play:

Klein: Do you think for kids that play or imaginative play should be understood as a form of consciousness, a state?

Gopnik: Yeah, that’s a really good question. So there’s really a kind of coherent whole about what childhood is all about. So if you think from this broad evolutionary perspective about these creatures that are designed to explore, I think there’s a whole lot of other things that go with that. So one thing that goes with that is this broad-based consciousness. But another thing that goes with it is the activity of play. And if you think about play, the definition of play is that it’s the thing that you do when you’re not working. Now it’s not a form of experience and consciousness so much, but it’s a form of activity. It’s a form of actually doing things that, nevertheless, have this characteristic of not being immediately directed to a goal. If you look across animals, for example, very characteristically, it’s the young animals that are playing across an incredibly wide range of different kinds of animals. Sometimes if they’re mice, they’re play fighting. And if they’re crows, they’re playing with twigs and figuring out how they can use the twigs. So, what goes on in play is different. But it’s really fascinating that it’s the young animals who are playing. And all of the theories that we have about play are play’s another form of this kind of exploration. So it’s another way of having this explore state of being in the world. [...] 

...children are the R&D wing of our species...

Klein: I was thinking about how a moment ago, you said, play is what you do when you’re not working. And I was thinking, it’s absolutely not what I do when I’m not working. I’m constantly like you, sitting here, being like, don’t work. And that’s not playing. And in fact, I think I’ve lost a lot of my capacity for play. I’ve trained myself to be productive so often that it’s sometimes hard to put it down. And it takes actual, dedicated effort to not do things that feel like work to me. What’s lost in that? Because I think there’s cultural pressure to not play, but I think that your research and some of the others suggest maybe we’ve made a terrible mistake on that by not honoring play more.

The default mode anticipates events

#Dark #control paper with @dohmatobelvis & @introspection:

Our #Markov #Decision #Process account: *how* may brain activity in the default network subserves “the development and maintenance of [a] probabilistic model of anticipated events”?https://t.co/eYu4FaqfOU pic.twitter.com/p3KcNxARDp

— danilobzdok (@danilobzdok) October 3, 2020

Hilary Hahn on daydreaming as a mode of practicing music, of priming yourself to go with the flow in performance

Some time in the last week I discovered TwoSet Violin, a YouTube channel for two Australian violinists, Brett Yang and Eddy Chen. They are classically trained and are perhaps the most interesting musical comedians since Victor Borge – though admittedly, musical comedy, in the sense of comedy acts organized around musical performance, is a scarcely populated genre. They’ve done a number of videos with Hilary Hahn, the classical violinist, who has also performed with them in some live concerts.

The following video is an hour and a half of conversation between the three of them. It starts off with chit-chat about being a performer, the logistics of touring, this that and the other, and then hits pay dirt when Hilary talks about daydreaming when she practices.

Of course, I know about daydreaming. And I know about daydreaming while practicing, too (I’m a semi-virtuoso jazz trumpeter). But daydreaming is something that’s been extensively studied, in one way or another, by contemporary neuroscience, and is associated with a complex of neuro-functional areas known as the default mode network (which I’ve blogged about). So I’ve transcribed some of that conversation below.

Starting at roughly 55:54:

Hilary: I daydream a lot when I practice. I don’t practice full volume all the time. I don’t practice like I’m performing. I’m daydreaming about the music. I’m playing it but I’m thinking what could I do? Can I do more of this here, or could I do more of that there? I just kind of leave my mind blank to see if something suddenly occurs to me that I wanna’ then practice, expound up on in the practice session. [...]

I don’t do visualizations, I guess. I don’t know. I’ll be practicing and I’ll think...Well, I kind of want to...

Brett: You talk about tinkering with practice.

Hilary: Yeah.

Brett: How does that work? Because it’s – I mean –

Eddy: I think a lot of people watching this would love

Eddy & Brett: to know how to

Eddy: Even help their own practice improve in efficiency, right?

Brett: What goes on in the mind of Hilary Hahn?

There’s a bit of chat back and forth in which they agree that Hilary will give a demonstration a bit later (at 1:22:22). She makes it clear she’s not talking about “spacing out,” that she’s “not giving them permission to not focus” (Eddie’s words).

Hilary: I’m not daydreaming about other things. I’m daydreaming about what the music could be.

Brett and Eddie with questions:

Do you hear it? Do you see like characters playing a story? Do you see yourself doing it? Do you see colors? Do you feel something? Smell? Taste?

Hilary: Let’s see. So, I’m trying to think of a parallel in another topic because it’s really hard to describe. It’s like if you just have a blank piece of paper and you have a pen and you draw a line. What else can you do with that line? Are you going to draw another line off of that line? Are you then gonna do like a circle? It’s kind of doodling? It’s mental doodling, with phrasing, with tempo, with everything.

I kind of start with a blank slate. I reverse the assumptions that I have. I just neutralize everything and then I’m...Kind of letting my mind wander. I’m thinking about what is going on with the orchestra. [Remember: she’s talking about personal practice here, not rehearsal much less actual performance.] Waiting for something to occur to me. I think people don’t ever think that happens in practice.

For a lot of people, I think practice is about being more accurate, improving your playing, being more expressive, being more this or that. But for me, yes, there’s that, but... Those are the tools to get to the point where you can let your mind wander and get ideas. Or it’s like having a bunch of Legos. What are you going to build with those Legos? You put one Lego on top of another and it kind of looks like a house. But then you realize, oh, I have these other Legos. Am I gonna build more in this house? Or am I gonna go off in that direction?

I’ll think about basic things like do I want a crescendo when it goes up or a decrescendo when it goes up? I’m always trying to trigger in mind into new phrasing ideas, so I don’t get stuck and so that when I’m working with other people, I don’t have a lot of rehearsal time and I need to present a unified concert. So, when I’m working with other people, how can I play it in a way that’s authentic to me, but really coincides with what they’re doing and brings out a better version of the music than we could arrive at ourselves separately.

Just a few seconds later after a question from Brett she’s switched from questions of aesthetic interpretation to matters of bottom-level physical technique. That is to say, these may seem to be very different worlds – the highest levels of almost “spiritual” artistry and the brute business of how to hold and manipulate your instrument – but to the skilled performer, one is but the obverse of the other:

I change my technique all the time too. I tinker with the angle of my thumb, the angle of my hand and I notice something’s getting explicably tired. So I’m playing and thinking, why is that – why is that tired? [...] Why is this...Is it how I’m...It’s like ... What is it? I’m just asking questions. [...] Why is this happening? Where is this going? What’s that about?

Eddy goes on to remark that after he left university things got better because he began to question the traditional way he was taught. And then he began to “play around with it.” But, “how much do you think one should balance between just self-experimentation and that creativity versus have a strong kind of teacher or a guide?”

And at this point (1:01:59) I’m going to leave off transcribing. You can decide for yourself whether or not you want to listen to the rest.

Hilary (1:02:23): “I know it’s good when I get goosebumps. [...] Or you feel like the audience was just 100% silent for a second and that second felt like forever. It’s just wow something magical just happened.”

Let that be the last word. But, I assure you, there’s some really interesting chat about actual performance from all three of them. Audience interaction makes all the difference in the world.

* * * * *

On magical moments in music, see this working paper for a collection of anecdotes: Emotion & Magic in Musical Performance. When Miles Davis brought the audience to 100% silence. Finally, note the remarks about riding a roller coaster and music at about  1:07:09. I've got a post on that.

New Perspectives on Spontaneous Brain Activity: Dynamic Networks and Energy Matter

Arturo Tozzi1, Marzieh Zare, and April A. Benasich, New Perspectives on Spontaneous Brain Activity: Dynamic Networks and Energy Matter, Front. Hum. Neurosci., 26 May 2016 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2016.00247

Spontaneous brain activity has received increasing attention as demonstrated by the exponential rise in the number of published article on this topic over the last 30 years. Such “intrinsic” brain activity, generated in the absence of an explicit task, is frequently associated with resting-state or default-mode networks (DMN)s. The focus on characterizing spontaneous brain activity promises to shed new light on questions concerning the structural and functional architecture of the brain and how they are related to “mind”. However, many critical questions have yet to be addressed. In this review, we focus on a scarcely explored area, specifically the energetic requirements and constraints of spontaneous activity, taking into account both thermodynamical and informational perspectives. We argue that the “classical” definitions of spontaneous activity do not take into account an important feature, that is, the critical thermodynamic energetic differences between spontaneous and evoked brain activity. Spontaneous brain activity is associated with slower oscillations compared with evoked, task-related activity, hence it exhibits lower levels of enthalpy and “free-energy” (i.e., the energy that can be converted to do work), thus supporting noteworthy thermodynamic energetic differences between spontaneous and evoked brain activity. Increased spike frequency during evoked activity has a significant metabolic cost, consequently, brain functions traditionally associated with spontaneous activity, such as mind wandering, require less energy that other nervous activities. We also review recent empirical observations in neuroscience, in order to capture how spontaneous brain dynamics and mental function can be embedded in a non-linear dynamical framework, which considers nervous activity in terms of phase spaces, particle trajectories, random walks, attractors and/or paths at the edge of the chaos. This takes us from the thermodynamic free-energy, to the realm of “variational free-energy”, a theoretical construct pertaining to probability and information theory which allows explanation of unexplored features of spontaneous brain activity.

Social brain and the default network

“Although the anatomical similarity between the social brain and the default brain is well documented, why this overlap exists remains a mystery.”

Social by Default: Characterizing the Social Functions of the Resting Brain https://t.co/5Wq5lRaRZd

— Rei Akaishi (@rei_akaishi) July 20, 2019

The complete abstract:

Social-neuroscience research has identified a set of medial frontoparietal brain regions that reliably engage during social cognition. At the same time, cognitive-neuroscience research has shown that these regions comprise part of the default network, so named because they reliably activate during mental breaks by default. Although the anatomical similarity between the social brain and the default brain is well documented, why this overlap exists remains a mystery. Does the tendency to engage these regions by default during rest have particular social functions, and if so, what might these be? Here, it is suggested that the default network performs two critical social functions during rest: social priming and social consolidation. These constructs will be defined, recently published empirical findings that support them will be reviewed, and directions for future research on the topic will be proposed.

Galen Strawson on Michael Pollan on Psychedelics

Galen Strawson review's Michael Pollan's How To Change Your Mind: The new science of psychedelics in TLS.

What should we call the experience?

There’s a terminally weary group of words used to characterize psychedelic experience. Among them we find (in descending order of association with the supernatural) “holy”, “sacred”, “mystical”, “spiritual”; “transcendence”, “bliss”, “selflessness”, “oneness”. Some are so loaded, and directly question-begging (in the original sense of the term), that it seems best to introduce a new neutral term – “X” – for the purposes of this review. X is whatever it is that is most powerfully positive in psychedelic experience. It is what psychologists try to measure when they administer the “Mystical Experience Questionnaire”, devised in the 1960s. There’s a wide consensus that there is no significant experiential difference between pharmacologically induced X and X that arises as a result of meditative or other spiritual practices.

However:

There is an extra­ordinary degree of agreement, on the part of those who have successful “trips” under suitably controlled conditions, that the fundamental principle of reality is love.

As the Beatles' sang, "Say the word, the word is love". After this and that Strawson observes:

But love requires a lover and a loved (it is logically a two-place relation), and most of those who use the word in an attempt to convey their X experience seem to have something else – a kind of perfectly impersonal blessedness – in mind.

We shouldn’t, then, look for “authenticity” in X experience – if that is supposed to mean that there’s nothing (ultimately) bad in reality. We can leave room for primordial blessedness if it allows for unutterable tragedy. But we should probably look no further than the magnificence of the experience itself. Its significance consists in the fact that it exists.

We can go a little further. There seems to be a deeper psychological formation underneath the experience of love. The best name for it, perhaps, is Acceptance (awarded a capital “A” to match Huxley’s capital-L “Love”): profound, anxiety-dissolving acquiescence in how things are, acceptance of life, acceptance of death. Acceptance, when attained, involves experience of great joy – just as relief from intense pain is (some say) the greatest human pleasure. It is what Nietzsche is after when he speaks of amor fati, loving one’s fate. It’s precisely what he lacked when, in July 1885, he wrote to Franz Overbeck that “my life now consists in the wish that things might be other than I understand them to be, and that someone might make my ‘truths’ appear unbelievable to me”.

Capital-A Acceptance seems tightly linked with the dissolution of one’s sense of self, or at least the elimination of one’s sense of the importance of self, and neuroscientists have not been slow to speculate about this. Scans of the tripping brain show dramatic reduction in the activity in the so-called default mode network or DMN – known to some neuro­scientists as “the me network”. One may doubt all such specific neurological hypotheses, but those who believe that the DMN is a suspect theoretical construct can think simply of activity in, and interaction between, the medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, inferior parietal lobule, lateral temporal cortex, dorsal medial prefrontal cortex and hippocampus.

Pollan reproduces two diagrams recently published by the Imperial College lab using various scanning technologies. They represent the activity and interconnectivity of a brain under the influence of psilocybin, and a brain after the administering of an “active placebo” (a placebo that causes a strong tingling sensation, so that one feels one may have been given the drug under test). They’re spectacularly different. The psilocybin brain is thick with areas of activity and lines of interconnection; the placebo or everyday brain is almost bare by comparison. One doesn’t have to accept any of the specific neurological explanations to concede that the diagrams point up the richness of psychedelic experience.

Some think that psychedelics simply reactivate earlier capacities. “Babies and children are basically tripping all the time”, in Alison Gopnik’s words. Growing up fits a powerful “reducing valve” onto the great consciousness engine of the brain, as philosophers like Henri Bergson and C. D. Broad once proposed, and as Wordsworth intimated – and St Paul (“now we see through a glass, darkly; then, face to face”). According to this theory, maturation renders the brain fit for purpose in a difficult world; it imposes a mental filter that admits, in Huxley’s words, only the “measly trickle of the kind of consciousness” we need in order to survive. Psychedelic drugs remove the valve or filter. They dissolve the standard self-system, interrupting what Hazlitt called the “long narrowing of the mind to our own particular feelings and interests”. They return us, in Pollan’s words, to the wonder of “unencumbered first sight, or virginal noticing, to which the adult brain has closed itself. (It’s so inefficient!)”

In ordinary life, as Kant said, the “dear self is always turning up”. Psychedelics takes it offline. In X experience we lose what Iris Murdoch calls the “fat relentless ego”. We quit – again in Murdoch’s words – the “familiar rat-runs of selfish day-dream”. It seems, furthermore – and crucially – that a single dose can have lasting effects.

There's a bit more.

H/t Tyler Cowen. 

Psychedelics and the default mode network (DMN)

Michael Pollan, The New York times Magazine:

If the ego can be said to have an address, it would probably be in something called the default mode network, a high-level hub in the brain linking the frontal cortex to older centers of memory and emotion. The D.M.N. appears to be involved in a range of operations related to our sense of self, like rumination, time travel (contemplating the past and future), theory of mind (the ability to impute mental states to others) and the so-called autobiographical self: It helps us integrate whatever’s happening to us now with the story of who we are, thereby giving us an abiding sense of a self that is consistent over time. Neuroscientists recently began imaging the brains of people on psilocybin or LSD, and they were surprised to find that, rather than increasing brain activity, as you might expect, the drugs radically quieted traffic in the D.M.N. In particular, when volunteers report the experience of ego dissolution, their brain imaging shows a precipitous drop in D.M.N. activity.

Taking this network temporarily offline may allow the whole system to “reboot,” in the words of Robin Carhart-Harris, a pioneering neuroscientist who has done extensive work imaging tripping brains at Imperial College London. The “loosening of cognition” that results, he says, is especially helpful to people suffering from the varieties of mental stuckness, including depression, addiction, anxiety and obsession.

All these conditions, as Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at Berkeley, points out, may share an etiology. “There are a range of difficulties and pathologies in adults, like depression, that are connected with the phenomenology of rumination, and an excessively narrow, ego-based focus,” says Gopnik, whose research explores the consciousness of children, which she believes bears a similarity to psychedelic consciousness. “You get stuck on the same thing, you can’t escape, you become obsessive, perhaps addictive. It seems plausible to me that psychedelic experience could help get us out of those states, create an opportunity in which the old stories of who we are might be rewritten.”

Emotional Contagion

From The Scientist:

The idea that emotions can spread from person to person is not new. But recent research is starting to uncover the physiological mechanisms behind such “emotional contagion.” A study published this month (May 9) in Psychological Science, for example, showed that infants dilate or contract their pupils in response to depictions of eyes with the corresponding state, suggesting that emotional contagion may develop early in life. A 2014 study found that mothers could pass emotional stress on to their babies in a largely unconscious way. Together, the findings add to a growing body of research revealing the role of this phenomenon in human interactions.

“One of the most important things as a human species is to communicate effectively,” said Garriy Shteynberg, a psychologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who has shown that emotional contagion is enhanced in group settings. In order to do that, “we need cognitive mechanisms that give us a lot of common background knowledge,” Shteynberg told The Scientist.

Our old friends synchrony and the default network:

The most popular model, developed by social psychologist Elaine Hatfield and colleagues, suggests that people tend to synchronize their emotional expressions with those of others, which leads them to internalize those states. This suggests, for example, that the act of smiling can make a person feel happiness.

As to what may be going on in the brain when this happens, some research suggests that emotional contagion may engage the default mode network—a set of brain circuits that are active when an individual is not engaged in any particular task, but may be thinking about his or herself or others, noted Richard Boyatzis of Case Western Reserve University. When this network is activated, a person may be picking up on emotional cues from others, he told The Scientist. And “the speed at which you pick it up is probably the most important issue going on,” as it suggests that this process is largely unconscious, Boyatzis said.

Students of literary culture, and broadcast media, take note. I'm particularly interested in the case of story-telling in preliterate cultures, which is, after all, the default situation for human story telling. Here the stories are well known and people absorb them in the company of others. That's very different from reading a book in the privacy of one's home.

This is your brain on LSD

From ScienceDaily:

Researchers from Imperial College London, working with the Beckley Foundation, have for the first time visualized the effects of LSD on the human brain.

In a series of experiments, scientists have gained a glimpse into how the psychedelic compound affects brain activity. The team administered LSD (Lysergic acid diethylamide) to 20 healthy volunteers in a specialist research centre and used various leading-edge and complementary brain scanning techniques to visualize how LSD alters the way the brain works.

The findings, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), reveal what happens in the brain when people experience the complex visual hallucinations that are often associated with LSD state. They also shed light on the brain changes that underlie the profound altered state of consciousness the drug can produce.

A major finding of the research is the discovery of what happens in the brain when people experience complex dreamlike hallucinations under LSD. Under normal conditions, information from our eyes is processed in a part of the brain at the back of the head called the visual cortex. However, when the volunteers took LSD, many additional brain areas -- not just the visual cortex -- contributed to visual processing.

Dr Robin Carhart-Harris, from the Department of Medicine at Imperial, who led the research, explained: "We observed brain changes under LSD that suggested our volunteers were 'seeing with their eyes shut' -- albeit they were seeing things from their imagination rather than from the outside world. We saw that many more areas of the brain than normal were contributing to visual processing under LSD -- even though the volunteers' eyes were closed. Furthermore, the size of this effect correlated with volunteers' ratings of complex, dreamlike visions. "

The study also revealed what happens in the brain when people report a fundamental change in the quality of their consciousness under LSD.

Dr Carhart-Harris explained: "Normally our brain consists of independent networks that perform separate specialised functions, such as vision, movement and hearing -- as well as more complex things like attention. However, under LSD the separateness of these networks breaks down and instead you see a more integrated or unified brain.

The original research article is available online HERE. Wouldn't you know, our good old friend the default mode network (DMN). From the first paragraph of the discussion section:

The present findings offer a comprehensive new perspective on the changes in brain activity characterizing the LSD state, enabling us to make confident new inferences about its functional neuroanatomy. Principal findings include increased visual cortex CBF, RSFC, and decreased alpha power, predicting the magnitude of visual hallucinations; and decreased DMN integrity, PH-RSC RSFC, and delta and alpha power (e.g., in the PCC), correlating with profound changes in consciousness, typified by ego-dissolution. More broadly, the results reinforce the view that resting state ASL, BOLD FC, and MEG measures can be used to inform on the neural correlates of the psychedelic state (9, 16). Importantly, strong relationships were found between the different imaging measures, particularly between changes in BOLD RSFC (e.g., network “disintegration” and “desegregation”) and decreases in oscillatory power, enabling us to make firmer inferences about their functional meaning.

Musical creativity in the brain

Musical Creativity “Revealed” in Brain Structure: Interplay between Motor, Default Mode, and Limbic Networks

David M. Bashwiner, Christopher J. Wertz, Ranee A. Flores & Rex E. Jung

Scientific Reports 6, Article number: 20482 (2016)

doi:10.1038/srep20482

Received: 16 July 2015

Accepted: 31 December 2015

Published online: 18 February 2016

Abstract

Creative behaviors are among the most complex that humans engage in, involving not only highly intricate, domain-specific knowledge and skill, but also domain-general processing styles and the affective drive to create. This study presents structural imaging data indicating that musically creative people (as indicated by self-report) have greater cortical surface area or volume in a) regions associated with domain-specific higher-cognitive motor activity and sound processing (dorsal premotor cortex, supplementary and pre-supplementary motor areas, and planum temporale), b) domain-general creative-ideation regions associated with the default mode network (dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, middle temporal gyrus, and temporal pole), and c) emotion-related regions (orbitofrontal cortex, temporal pole, and amygdala). These findings suggest that domain-specific musical expertise, default-mode cognitive processing style, and intensity of emotional experience might all coordinate to motivate and facilitate the drive to create music.

* * * * *

From the introduction to  the article:

One brain network that has been proposed to be especially central to creative functioning is the default mode network (DMN)7,8. The DMN is composed of regions such as the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dMPFC), ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vMPFC), lateral temporal cortex (LTC), posterior cingulate, and inferior parietal lobule (IPL)—regions which, when a subject is not given an explicit task, tend to increase in activation relative to baseline9. The regions of this network also tend to be implicated in a number of cognitive capacities related to creativity, such as divergent thinking7,8, self-referential thinking10, affective reasoning6, mind wandering11, and mental simulation12. It might be expected, therefore, that creative behavior of a musical nature would also implicate the DMN.

* * * * *

Cf. Art in the Brain and the Default Mode Network (DMN)