Month: September 2018

The Default Mode

During the course of our daily lives the vast majority of us spend almost all of our time in what is called the Default Mode, activated by the Default Mode Network of the brain. It’s the DMN that gives us our very selves, constructed from memories of the past, observations during the present, and projections into the future.

This way of existing  is so utterly familiar that we don’t even notice it unless we are forced to pay attention—if, for example, we are overwhelmed by ruminating on something embarrassing we did, or on someone’s slighting us. Even then we have no idea what we’re doing or why, and are helpless to stop it. And so we thrash around with various attempts at an explanation (“I’m so stupid! Why did I do that?!” “That person is such a jerk! I hate her!”).  These thoughts may be painful, but they appear to point to a solution. If I’m stupid, maybe I can figure out a way to wise up, or if I can identify another person as a hateful jerk, maybe I can undermine them in some way.

We need the Default Mode Network to get through the day. It’s what keeps us on track, helps us know what to do next, and makes it possible for us to learn from our mistakes.  Alzheimer’s patients are progressively hampered in their functioning by the erosion of the DMN. Unfortunately, the DMN can drive us crazy when it is overstimulated. People suffering from depression have an overactive DMN. The symboliste poet Charles Baudelaire describes this condition in Spleen II from the Fleurs du Mal: “J’ai plus de souvenirs que si j’avais milles ans”—

I have more memories than if I’d lived a thousand years.

A heavy chest of drawers cluttered with balance-sheets,
Processes, love-letters, verses, ballads,
And heavy locks of hair enveloped in receipts,
Hides fewer secrets than my gloomy brain.
It is a pyramid, a vast burial vault
Which contains more corpses than potter’s field.
— I am a cemetery abhorred by the moon,
In which long worms crawl like remorse
And constantly harass my dearest dead.
I am an old boudoir full of withered roses,
Where lies a whole litter of old-fashioned dresses,
Where the plaintive pastels and the pale Bouchers,
Alone, breathe in the fragrance from an opened phial.

Even without running amok, the DMN is behind what causes ordinary dukkha, dissatisfaction and unhappiness. I’ll give an example from this morning when I took the dog out for his first walk of the day. Just as I stepped out the door I was immediately struck by the warm, humid air and the breezes. “It feels like swimming,” I thought, as the dog urged me forward from the driveway to the sidewalk. There was something delicious about the breezes, about the way they caressed my neck and entire body, as well as the smells of vegetation and the sounds of the morning. I saw the leaves of the trees rustling gently in a delicate dance.

Meanwhile, my dog was sniffing along the walkway for information about what other dogs might have passed the house and when, adding his scent at strategic points. My mind began to wander, thinking about the day ahead, wondering what I would try to do with my time, and evaluating my level of physical energy. I stopped being aware of what was going on around me as I became absorbed by pictures in my head. I saw myself doing laundry, doing dishes, sitting in meditation. Imaginary conversations popped up.

Later, as I was digging up a few weeds, I began talking to some image of a younger person—maybe my childhood self?—about the kinds of weeds I was seeing. “That big sprawling grass is actually pretty easy to yank out, but the taproot thistles are the worst! And those smaller grasses have networks of roots, and if you break them off and leave a piece, they just come right back.” Maybe I wanted to share my knowledge with someone. I used to be a teacher, and had a young child once who is now 17 and doesn’t listen to anything I say. Who knows.

We live with stories about ourselves, some of them helpful, others not so much. Some are paralyzing. At different times in our lives, different stories capture our interest. Sometimes we go to therapy, where we can learn to identify disabling stories and substitute positive ones. When stories become dominant over a culture or subculture they can harden into ideologies or belief systems. The work of historians is to make sense out of data and turn it into a narrative, an explanation, an account.

These activities are our defense against chaos, but underlying the stories about who we are is a noise machine in the brain that we scarcely notice, spouting random thoughts and images without letup. I sometimes play a game of trying to trace back a chain of thought to its origin. The mind leapfrogs from one idea to another, based on associations, puns, or resemblances, beginning its journey with an input, something we see or hear that strikes our notice, and ending far, far, away. In the meantime the leaves are shimmering with a light breeze, and the body is alive with a play of sensations, and we aware of none of it.

In the Default Mode we sleepwalk through our life, dreaming our dreams while life goes on in and around us. The consequences of not paying attention can be tragic and deadly. The work of spiritual practice is to open our minds to awareness, to move us in the direction of waking up from our enchanted sleep.

Stuff

I need to take time out of my narrative and talk about something that is currently on my mind: the disposition of my parents’ stuff. This is something that I have been doing for years now, ever since my mother moved from Cape Cod to Minnesota eleven years ago. She had been a widow for four years at the time of her move. During the period between my father’s death and moving to be near my family, she rattled around alone in the home they’d made together following his retirement in 1980. Of all the places they’d lived throughout their married life, that last house was the one they’d had the longest.

They both experienced the Great Depression and poverty as children. My maternal grandmother, abandoned with two small children in the 1920s, kept the house she’d paid cash for and took in boarders. Neither child had their own bedroom, sleeping on sofas in the dining room or living room. There were days when they didn’t know what they’d have to eat. My paternal grandfather lost his job and was almost broken by it. My father mowed a golf course from sunup until sundown during the summer and either gave the money to his parents or saved it for college tuition. In college, he never had a spare dime for anything beyond the necessities of life.

By the time my own parents embarked on their life together, having enough and then some was important to them. Over the years they accumulated things and experiences, buying Persian rugs, fine china, and nice clothes, and travelling. They kept their frugal ways in their focus on getting a bargain for everything they bought, which gave them a sense of control, seeing it as beating the system. If something nice was on sale my mother would buy it in quantities far beyond what she could use, stockpiling for a rainy day. These habits persisted for as long as she kept her independence.

My father began showing signs of dementia by the time he was 80, and gradually faded over the next five years until he died. My mother cared for him in their home, only resorting to sending him to an adult day care program in his last year or so. While he was declining I noticed that magazines piled up on furniture all over the house, while unfolded laundry accumulated in the bedroom. In the basement there were more clothes and a lifetime’s worth of miscellaneous stuff, with a room off the main basement full of shelves loaded with canned goods. After my father’s death the clutter increased, not to the point of hoarding, but significant nonetheless.

During the four years in Massachusetts my mother spoke over and over of moving out to be with me but had trouble coming to a decision. She’d come out to our place and look at real estate and talk about moving only to change her mind. I became exasperated and let her know it, but it did no good; my mother needed to let her process unfold in its own time. Finally she announced out of the blue one day that she was coming. The wheels were then put in motion to stage her house for sale, secure a place for her here, and dispose of some of her things and move the rest.

What she wanted was a leisurely process of going through her beloved things and deciding where they would go. Some she would give away to select individuals, others to charity, and reluctantly, still others she would let go to the dump. Unfortunately she had no concept of the scope of the task, nor was she prepared to do what was necessary to complete it. In the spring of 2007 she hired someone at $50 an hour to help her pack, but over several months barely scratched the surface. Above all, she was consumed by the belief that wasting usable things was immoral. By summer, however, the clock was ticking. She had hired a realtor and now had a timetable for getting the place ready.

That summer when I travelled to see her with my husband and son I was also in denial. The moment of truth arrived when, on the last day of our visit, I finally went to see the realtor, who told me that I would have to stay on and tend to the process myself; my mother was completely incapable of doing it, and would die in that house long before it was completed. The realtor proposed getting a group of men and their trucks in to cart everything away en masse over a period of two or three days. Trying to take any but minimal furniture out to Minnesota was unrealistic, as was continuing to sift through things. This meant I had to confront my mother and take the fallout.

It was brutal, but it got done. My mother yelled at me, howled against the realtor, hated the men who did the moving, and railed against the waste that ensued. One evening there wasn’t adequate time to load everything on the trucks, so a lot of her stuff stayed outside on the back patio. This was a scandal to my mother, to see her old television sets and stereo equipment from the 1970s sitting out exposed to the elements. I felt torn between her feelings and the prodding of the realtor, between the cruelty of the process and what I had come to see as its necessity. Eventually the house was beautifully staged, it sold for a good price, and my mother moved out to Minnesota, along with what was still a massive load of stuff. It ended up in a pile of boxes in her new apartment. The story of how we got it unpacked and put away will have to wait for another day.