The Brain’s Default Network and its Adaptive Role in Internal Mentation

By Jessica R. Andrews-Hanna. The Neuroscientist, 2011

1,053 citations recorded by the source corpus.

During the many idle moments that comprise daily life, the human brain increases its activity across a set of midline and lateral cortical brain regions known as the “default network.” Despite the robustness with which the brain defaults to this pattern of activity, surprisingly little is known about the network’s precise anatomical organization and adaptive functions. To provide insight into these questions, this article synthesizes recent literature from structural and functional imaging with a growing behavioral literature on mind wandering. Results characterize the default network as a set of interacting hubs and subsystems that play an important role in “internal mentation”—the introspective and adaptive mental activities in which humans spontaneously and deliberately engage in every day.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/55eeb067259acc89a6b1c216c5f43bafaa735065

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

Creative Cognition and Brain Network Dynamics (2015, background): “Default network activity is associated with spontaneous and self-generated thought, including mind wandering, mental simulation, social cognition, autobiographical retrieval, and episodic future thinking [5,13,14].”
Capturing the spatiotemporal dynamics of self-generated, task-initiated thoughts with EEG and fMRI (2019, positive): “In line with previous task-related studies (Andrews-Hanna, 2012; Andrews-Hanna et al., 2014; Axelrod et al., 2017), the fMRI data revealed that thinking about self-experienced past events boosted a brain network known to be related to autobiographic episodic memory, while performing mental…”
The wandering brain: Meta-analysis of functional neuroimaging studies of mind-wandering and related spontaneous thought processes (2015, neutral): “The reference lists of each included study, as well as those of several major reviews (Andrews-Hanna, 2012; Andrews-Hanna et al., 2014b; Christoff, 2012), were also searched, to ensure completeness.”
Exploring PERMA in spectator sport: Applying positive psychology to examine the individual-level benefits of sport consumption (2016, background): “Neuroscientists also espouse that humans deliberately and unconsciously disconnect from reality to simulate the past and future on a daily basis (Andrews-Hanna, 2012), highlighting the importance of being able to draw upon positive emotions to guard past, present, and future mental states.”
The Default Network and Social Cognition (2015, background): “…personal knowledge, recall autobiographical memories, consider their future goals or mental states, and simulate personal future events or social interactions (Andrews-Hanna, 2012; D’Argembeau, 2013; Denny, Kober, Wager, & Ochsner, 2012; Moran, Kelley, & Heatherton, 2013; Spreng et al., 2009).”
Clinical applications of the functional connectome (2013, positive): “The DN is a distributed set of brain regions associated with spontaneous cognition, internalized thought and emotion regulation that are consistently deactivated during the performance of goal-driven cognitive tasks (Andrews-Hanna, 2012; AndrewsHanna et al., 2010; Raichle and Snyder, 2007).”
Intrinsic architecture underlying the relations among the default, dorsal attention, and frontoparietal control networks of the human brain (2012, background): “, Andrews-Hanna, J. R., & Schacter, D. L. (2008). The brain's default network: anatomy, function, and relevance to disease.”
Episodic Memory and Beyond: The Hippocampus and Neocortex in Transformation (2016, neutral): “Functional connectivity can be investigated at the level of large-scale networks, such as the default mode network (Andrews-Hanna 2012), or at the level of small networks that are assembled to mediate a specific cognitive operation and rapidly disassembled when the operation is no longer needed.”
Imagine all the people: how the brain creates and uses personality models to predict behavior. (2014, methodology): “Default network activity was observed across 3 imagination tasks (consistent with this network’s involvement in internally focused thoughts; Andrews-Hanna 2012), but subregions of this network were more involved in social and interpersonal information processing.”
EEG microstates as a tool for studying the temporal dynamics of whole‐brain neuronal networks: A review (2017, background): “Similarly, Andrews-Hanna and colleagues reported that the dorsal medial cortex subsystem of the default mode network is responsible for internally guided cognition, while the medial temporal subsystem is responsible for memory-guided imagery (Andrews-Hanna, 2012; Andrews-Hanna et al., 2010).”