Nature Neuroscience
January 28, 2025
Casey Paquola, Margaret Garber, Stefan Frässle et al.
58 citations
The default mode network (DMN) is implicated in many aspects of complex thought and behavior. Here, we leverage postmortem histology and in vivo neuroimaging to characterize the anatomy of the DMN to better understand its role in information processing and cortical communication. Our results show that the DMN is cytoarchitecturally heterogenous, containing cytoarchitectural types that are...
Nature reviews. Neuroscience
July 5, 2021
Jonathan Smallwood, Boris C. Bernhardt, Robert Leech et al.
970 citations
The default mode network (DMN) is a set of widely distributed brain regions in the parietal, temporal and frontal cortex. These regions often show reductions in activity during attention-demanding tasks but increase their activity across multiple forms of complex cognition, many of which are linked to memory or abstract thought. Within the cortex, the DMN has been shown to be located in regions...
iScience
February 2, 2021
Jonathan Smallwood, Adam Turnbull, Hao-ting Wang et al.
130 citations
A core goal in cognitive neuroscience is identifying the physical substrates of the patterns of thought that occupy our daily lives. Contemporary views suggest that the landscape of ongoing experience is heterogeneous and can be influenced by features of both the person and the context. This perspective piece considers recent work that explicitly accounts for both the heterogeneity of the...
Scientific Reports
December 3, 2020
Theodoros Karapanagiotidis, Diego Vidaurre, Andrew J. Quinn et al.
82 citations
When unoccupied by an explicit external task, humans engage in a wide range of different types of self-generated thinking. These are often unrelated to the immediate environment and have unique psychological features. Although contemporary perspectives on ongoing thought recognise the heterogeneity of these self-generated states, we lack both a clear understanding of how to classify the...
Neuroimage
June 22, 2020
Brontë Mckeown, Will Strawson, Hao-ting Wang et al.
102 citations
Contemporary accounts of ongoing thought recognise it as a heterogeneous and multidimensional construct, varying in both form and content. An emerging body of evidence demonstrates that distinct types of experience are associated with unique neurocognitive profiles, that can be described at the whole-brain level as interactions between multiple large-scale networks. The current study sought to...
Scientific Reports
November 7, 2019
Meichao Zhang, Nicola Savill, Daniel S. Margulies et al.
48 citations
Often, as we read, we find ourselves thinking about something other than the text; this tendency to mind-wander is linked to poor comprehension and reduced subsequent memory for texts. Contemporary accounts argue that periods of off-task thought are related to the tendency for attention to be decoupled from external input. We used fMRI to understand the neural processes that underpin this...
May 29, 2019
Michael Lifshitz, Matthew D. Sacchet, Julia M. Huntenburg et al.
1 citation
Major depressive disorder (MDD) is associated with abnormal functional interactions among large-scale brain networks. Here we report findings from a randomized, active-controlled trial examining whether mindfulness-based therapy can regulate specific patterns of resting-state functional connectivity in clinically depressed patients. We show that a brief, clinically effective mindfulness...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
August 27, 2018
Mladen Sormaz, Charlotte Murphy, Hao-ting Wang et al.
291 citations
Regions of transmodal cortex, in particular the default mode network (DMN), have historically been argued to serve functions unrelated to task performance, in part because of associations with naturally occurring periods of off-task thought. In contrast, contemporary views of the DMN suggest it plays an integrative role in cognition that emerges from its location at the top of a cortical...
Neuroimage
January 12, 2018
Charlotte Murphy, Elizabeth Jefferies, Shirley-Ann Rueschemeyer et al.
288 citations
The default mode network supports a variety of mental operations such as semantic processing, episodic memory retrieval, mental time travel and mind-wandering, yet the commonalities between these functions remains unclear. One possibility is that this system supports cognition that is independent of the immediate environment; alternatively or additionally, it might support higher-order...
Schizophrenia Bulletin
June 8, 2016
Ben Alderson-Day, Kelly Diederen, Charles Fernyhough et al.
134 citations
In recent years, there has been increasing interest in the potential for alterations to the brain's resting-state networks (RSNs) to explain various kinds of psychopathology. RSNs provide an intriguing new explanatory framework for hallucinations, which can occur in different modalities and population groups, but which remain poorly understood. This collaboration from the International...
PLoS One
May 13, 2014
Krzysztof J. Gorgolewski, Daniel J. Lurie, Sebastian Urchs et al.
180 citations
Although neural activity often reflects the processing of external inputs, intrinsic fluctuations in activity have been observed throughout the brain. These may relate to patterns of self-generated thought that can occur while not performing goal-driven tasks. To understand the relationship between self-generated mental activity and intrinsic neural fluctuations, we developed the New York...