The Default Network and Yoga

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Daydreaming often gets a bad reputation, but a wandering mind is not wayward.The default network, a brain area composed of midline and lateral cortical regions, activates with idle thinking and may be responsible for achieving mental harmony. Recent neurological research indicates that task-off states of attention, like during sattva, may be instrumental in uncluttering the mind and resolving problems. In this way, yogic practices may facilitate efficient, stress-relieving thinking because they engage the default network.

First, the default network helps us with perceptual decoupling. Decoupling is breaking mental relationships that are omnipresent in our consciousness. Perception, for example, is the fruit of bridging external stimuli with our internal experience. When the default network is activated by entering a meditative state, our perception is decoupled from the outside world and we begin to turn inward. The ability to sense our inner lives without interference from the environment allows us to meditate virtually anywhere. Yoga promotes the use of the default network because its focus on breath and body movement diminishes the brain’s awareness of one’s surroundings.

Practicing yoga also helps people learn how to tune out distractions and improve mental strengthwithout requiring the constant and active suppression of thoughts. Self-control and thought suppression use a limited resource, glucose, that can leave people feeling exhausted and distractible. Yogic exercises training the mind to enter a task-off state rather than an active suppression state. At first, participants might engage in active thinking as they study the movements, but as movements become routine, the mind can empty. Using yoga to quiet the mind strengthens the default network and allows participants to use this calm focus to approach other aspects of their life with such mindfulness.

Control of the mind is key to insight. Psychologists define certain problems as ‘insight’ problems when no matter how much a participant tries, they will not make any progress until the answer is suddenly clear. Completing a maze is not an insight problem because working with the puzzle for longer brings one closer to the solution. Solving anagrams by unscrambling letters into a meaningful word or phrase requires insight because the answer is either known, or it is unknown. Researchers verify that people who daydream before confronting an insight problem see the answer more immediately than those who do not. Since these same brain regions are heavily activated during yoga, is it no surprise that feelings of clarity and resolve are benefits of routine yogic practices.

Participating in yoga facilitates passive insightful thinking. Active thinking about problems and solutions may draw one from sattva into rajas, which is to force what should be a meditative practice to a task. Finding evenness in the breath and focusing on the chakras helps one to allow thoughts and feelings to flow through the body while maintaining a task-off state. Therefore, free interchange of thoughts and body movements use the quiet focus of the default network, but nottaxing mental faculties. In this way, practicing yoga is solving stressful problems without the stress as insight and relationships between thoughts are flourishing.The relationship between unlikely thoughts is often attributed to the creative process, paralleling the philosophy behind hatha yoga, which encourages the balancing of opposite forces to find balance, harmony, and insight.

Practicing hatha yoga involves both sympathetic and parasympathetic processes, similarly, the brain alternates between more active and more passive patterns. Linking opposite patterns though yoga may facilitate insight even more than daydreaming alone. Colloquial evidence supports this theory as one often finds the issues plaguing their mind when they awoke are completely resolved by the time they finish a session of yoga. This is not a distraction from life’s problems, it is a highly efficient mode of generating solutions.

Also, these thinking patterns engage the same brain regions that are responsible for conceptual organization. The reinterpretation of information into meaningful concepts improves its retention as well as its significance. Using yoga to strengthen these regions through focus and exercise helps the brain with daily maintenance of information,thus, a yoga-trained mind is neat mind. It is better at organizing and uncluttering thoughts than the mind that does not participate in yoga and train the default network.

In sum, yoga is mental boot camp for the default network and rewards its participants with increased focus, efficient problem solving, feelings of resolve, insightful patterns of thinking, and longer periods of sattva.

Author Bio:

Andy Earle is a researcher who studies parent-teen communication and adolescent risk behaviors. He is the co-founder of talkingtoteens.com, ghostwriter at WriteItGreat.com, and host of the Talking to Teens podcast, a free weekly talk show for parents of teenagers.

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