I knew it. I knew when I was draped over a couch doing absolutely nothing, I was still creating. As Jack Nicholson’s character in The Shining forcibly points out, you don’t have to be typing to be writing. We may feel like blank slates, but our brains are still beavering away.
"Many neuroscientists have long assumed that much of the neural activity inside your head when at rest matches your subdued, somnolent mood. In this view, the activity in the resting brain represents nothing more than random noise, akin to the snowy pattern on the television screen when a station is not broadcasting. But recent analysis produced by neuroimaging technologies has revealed something quite remarkable: a great deal of meaningful activity is occurring in the brain when a person is sitting back and doing nothing at all. "It turns out that when your mind is at rest - when you are daydreaming quietly in a chair, say, [or] 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 an 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. ..."Further analyses indicated that performing a particular task increases the brain's energy consumption by less than 5 percent of the underlying baseline activity. A large fraction of the overall activity - from 60 to 80 percent of all energy used by the brain - occurs in circuits unrelated to any external event. With a nod to our astronomer colleagues, our group came to call this intrinsic activity the brain's dark energy, a reference to the unseen energy that also represents the mass of most of the universe. Marcus E. Raichle, "The Brain's Dark Energy," Scientific American, March 2010
The secret word is Idle
"Many neuroscientists have long assumed that much of the neural activity inside your head when at rest matches your subdued, somnolent mood. In this view, the activity in the resting brain represents nothing more than random noise, akin to the snowy pattern on the television screen when a station is not broadcasting. But recent analysis produced by neuroimaging technologies has revealed something quite remarkable: a great deal of meaningful activity is occurring in the brain when a person is sitting back and doing nothing at all. "It turns out that when your mind is at rest - when you are daydreaming quietly in a chair, say, [or] 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 an 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. ..."Further analyses indicated that performing a particular task increases the brain's energy consumption by less than 5 percent of the underlying baseline activity. A large fraction of the overall activity - from 60 to 80 percent of all energy used by the brain - occurs in circuits unrelated to any external event. With a nod to our astronomer colleagues, our group came to call this intrinsic activity the brain's dark energy, a reference to the unseen energy that also represents the mass of most of the universe. Marcus E. Raichle, "The Brain's Dark Energy," Scientific American, March 2010
The secret word is Idle
That is why exercizing the wisdom necessary to sleep on it, whenever possible, before acting, pays off so often. Bob Dylan was not right about everthing.
ReplyDeleteyou know nothing about bob dylan or any other good people of the earth that i know very well unlike you so shut the fuck up.
ReplyDeleteIs this is all you can say?
ReplyDelete