Putting your brain in neutral does not mean it is turned off. An article in the March, 2010 Scientific American, entitled The Brain’s Dark Energy describes research showing that our brains are quite active when we are not doing anything in particular:
It turns out that when your mind is at rest—when you are daydreaming quietly in a chair, say, asleep in a bed or anesthetized for surgery—dispersed brain areas are chattering away to one another. And the energy consumed by this ever active messaging, known as the brain’s default mode, is about 20 times that used by the brain when it responds consciously to a pesky fly or another outside stimulus. Indeed, most things we do consciously, be it sitting down to eat dinner or making a speech, mark a departure from the baseline activity of the brain default mode.
This is apparently a surprise to some neuroscientists. It is probably less surprising to meditators who sit quietly and observe a great deal of mental activity while the environment is making negligible demands on their brains. In our day to day consciousness, our attention is directed toward doing things. As we are aware of this action, we may assume that’s what the brain is putting most of its energy into. According to the research, that’s not the case. Most of our brain’s energy is going toward activity below the level of our attention and unrelated to our responses to the external environment.
It’s like watching a TV show. We see what’s on display, but much is happening back stage that we know nothing about. Is the show’s director less important than the actors? It would be naïve to think so. Should we think that the mental activity happening independent of our awareness or even beyond our ability to measure it with brain scans is less important than our more apparent brain activity? It would be naïve to think that too.
Sometimes our computer hard drive is active, but that activity is not represented on the screen. Sometimes our brain is working and nothing shows up in awareness. Just because we don’t see the effects of action, we need not assume it doesn’t exist. Our brains are always busy taking care of us. It is sometimes in our best interest to let it do its job without adding to the workload.
In meditation, we may tune in to more subtle levels of consciousness. It is possible to become aware of the action of our brain in default mode. Plenty is happening when we are quiet. We need just observe. At one level, images and thoughts arise without being called up. At a quieter level we may perceive a formless consciousness.
In practice, one might start with a meditative focus on an object of attention, such as the rising and falling of the breath. Then when the mind is calmer, shift attention to the action of the mind itself. Become aware of awareness. The interest is not in the content of the mind, but in the mind itself.
© 2010 Tom Barrett