Listening to sad music, compared with happy music, leads people to withdraw attention inward and engage in more mind-wandering—spontaneous, self-referential thought. Three experiments using probe-caught thought sampling and fMRI showed that sad music was associated with stronger mind-wandering and greater centrality of nodes in the Default Mode Network (DMN). The findings demonstrate that DMN activity can be modulated by the emotional valence of music, suggesting that sad music promotes internally directed cognition. These results have implications for using music in education and clinical settings to influence thought patterns.
Religious chanting produces a distinctive pattern of brain activity, with the posterior cingulate cortex showing the largest decrease in eigenvector centrality, potentially due to delta oscillations generated within that region. These effects are not explained by heart rate, breathing, or implicit language processing. The findings suggest that the neural correlates of religious chanting differ from those of meditation and prayer, and may produce unique psychotherapeutic effects.
Up-regulation and down-regulation of the default mode network via real-time fMRI neurofeedback are negatively correlated in an initial session, meaning that people who get better at increasing default mode network activity tend to get worse at decreasing it, and vice versa. Age is linked to worse neurofeedback performance only in healthy individuals, not in those with psychiatric history. Adults with psychiatric history outperform healthy controls at up-regulating the default mode network, but this difference arises because healthy controls show no up-regulation learning. These findings come from analyzing open-access data from 136 participants (74 with psychiatric history, 62 healthy controls).