The Hidden Brain

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http://www.newsweek.com/2010/05/31/the- ... brain.html

snip

Oops. Neuroscience is having its dark-energy moment, feeling as chagrined as astronomers who belatedly realized that the cosmos is awash in more invisible matter and mysterious (“dark”) energy than make up the atoms in all the stars, planets, nebulae, and galaxies. For it turns out that when someone is just lying still and the mind is blank, neurons are chattering away like Twitter addicts. The very idea of default activity was so contrary to the herd wisdom that when Marcus Raichle of Washington University in St. Louis, one of its discoverers, submitted a paper about it, a journal rejected it. That the brain might be so active in regions “doing nothing,” he says, had “escaped the neuroimaging establishment.” Now the establishment is catching up, with more and more labs investigating the brain’s default activity and a June meeting in Barcelona on brain mapping devoted to it.

On that score, it’s striking that the brains of people with autism and schizophrenia show aberrant default activity and messed-up connections in regions that seem to be its ground zero. This abnormal default activity may be the basis for the trouble schizophrenics have distinguishing reality from fantasy, and the difficulty autistics have with social interaction. More than anything, though, the default activity offers a cautionary tale about the hubris of scientists who dismiss anything the brain does as unimportant.

Thanks for the link. I love reading about this kind of thing.

Seems to me like the kind of discovery any reasonably serious meditator makes. I'm shocked that this is considered some kind of revelation by 'western science'.

The only quiet brains are dead brains. Knowing that the alive brain is fulminating with neural activity is hardly a new discovery.

ruveyn

Yes, I think that's what I'm getting at. I don't see where the revelation is here. I reread the thing a few times. It's probably my fault. *shrugs*

ok, i am not sure if this is the same thing as the one i read http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 180702.htm
but the catch is that in this study people that daydreamed but were not aware of it had much larger activity than both people that daydreamed but were aware and fully alert people. the activity was also in "integrating" areas.

for me it was a great discovery that suggests that treating inattentive ADD with medication has severe impacts.

Not necesarily. I've seen plenty of academic studies of the obvious. There's a certain mindset in academia that something doesn't exist if you can't give a citation for it so a certain amount of studies of the obvious are necessary, even when somewhat ridiculous.

For example, one of the most classic and often-cited studies in sociology is a paper that basically says that if you leave a parked car with a broken window, it will get vandalized much more quickly than a parked car that is intact and in good condition. That's pretty obvious but it's a famous study and considered very important in many different social studies fields.

studying what is obvious is important. intuition and common sense are often wrong or even more often only part of the story. you need a solid foundation for any hierarchical research otherwise it may be invalidated if based on shaky groundwork. I think it is a virtue to be skeptical and still hold value in all the things that you think may be true. scientists sometimes get a bad press for their skepticism but the way i see it is that they have their own ideas and are just not willing to claim them as truth until they are proved. or at least that is the idea.

Can you please elaborate; It does concern me.

sorry it is just my conclusion, meaning it is not official. i can email you the paper if you want to read it for yourself.