Default Mode Network: work, rest and play in the 21st century
Can it be true that we can be more productive when we work less? It seems counter-intuitive, but Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, founder of Strategy and Rest in the Silicon Valley and a Stanford University visiting scholar, thinks so. His 2017 book, Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, makes the case for more understanding of the benefits of active rest.
What is the basis for this belief?
It is to be found in the science pertaining to the default mode network (DMN), which is a large-scale brain network comprising the medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex/precuneus and angular gyrus. It is active when a person is not focused on the outside world and the brain is at wakeful rest, such as during daydreaming and mind-wandering.
The idea that the brain is always busy was first proposed in 1929 by Hans Berger, but it wasn’t until the work of Louis Sokoloff and his team in the 1950s that the proposal that brain metabolism remained the same whether a person was at rest or performing complex mental tasks was taken seriously by neurologists. By the 1990s, things had moved on again: researchers noticed that when a person is involved in perception, language, and attention tasks, the front part of the brain became less active compared to passive rest, and labelled these areas as becoming "deactivated".
By 2001, Marcus E. Raichle at Washington University was using the phrase ‘default mode’ to describe resting state brain function. In simple terms, what had changed since the 1950s was the belief that brain activity remained constant, to be replaced with the new knowledge that the DMN is actually suspended when involved in goal-orientated behaviours and is instead engaged in internally directed thoughts. However, research has progressed once more: recent research has demonstrated that DMN is active in certain internal goal-directed tasks such as social working memory and autobiographical tasks.
Default mode network connectivity. Photo: Andreashorn/Creative Commons 4.0
How does it function?
This is the description from Wikipedia:
It is potentially the neurological basis for the self:
Autobiographical information: Memories of collection of events and facts about oneself
Self-reference: Referring to traits and descriptions of oneself
Emotion of oneself: Reflecting about one's own emotional state
Thinking about others:[20]
Theory of mind: Thinking about the thoughts of others and what they might or might not know
Emotions of other: Understanding the emotions of other people and empathising with their feelings
Moral reasoning: Determining just and unjust result of an action
Social evaluations: Good-bad attitude judgments about social concepts
Social categories: Reflecting on important social characteristics and status of a group
Social isolation: A perceived lack of social interaction.
Remembering the past and thinking about the future:
Remembering the past: Recalling events that happened in the past
Imagining the future: Envisioning events that might happen in the future
Episodic memory: Detailed memory related to specific events in time
Story comprehension: Understanding and remembering a narrative
Unsurprisingly, understanding the DMD has a variety of possible clinical purposes, ranging from Alzheimer’s disease to PTSD.
What might this all mean for the way we live and work in the future?
We need a sustainable work/life model as the century progresses. A part of that will be reimagining how we can we best be productive, and what relationship that has to the amount of hours we work, and what we are doing when we’re not working. Pang, when interviewed about this, said what he used to think:
“more hours equalled more productivity. This is an assumption – a mistake – that we’ve been making for a very long time. And now there’s more than a century’s worth of work that overwork in the long run is bad for people and organisations and also bad for productivity. It’s something that can be sustained for periods of a few weeks but after that you start creating more problems than you solve.”
This has the potential to be the equivalent of an evolutionary step, given the capacity that technology has to facilitate productivity. Having said that, this is of course in no way something that will happen automatically; indeed, the experience of many people will be that communications tech in particular has given work greater capacity to invade every aspect of our lives. We all know the experience of getting a work email on a Sunday afternoon, or at ten in the evening.
This is why, in the context of a world that encourages overwork, more progressive companies are limiting such contact. Given many of us have spent the last 18 months working from home due to the pandemic, getting the work-life balance right has become a hot topic. McKinsey’s recent The Future of Work report states that moving forward “20 to 25 percent of the workforces in advanced economies could work from home between three and five days a week.” This suggests that the need to navigate a hybrid working model and ensure that productivity remains as constant as possible, while creating environments both at home and in the workplace that push empathy, has been accelerated in the current period.
To return to Alex Pang, he is a great believer in the idea of deliberate rest. In his own words:
“We think of rest as a negative space defined by absence of work but it’s really much more than that. The counterintuitive discovery is that many of the most restorative kinds of rest are actually active. Things like exercise or walks or serious, engaging hobbies do more for you than sitting on the couch binge-watching television. The more supine kinds of rest certainly have their place but active rest delivers the greatest benefits. It also provides occasion for creative reflection.”
As the initial paragraphs above clarified, this is backed up by the science. In the last 15 years it has been possible to measure the DMN with resting state scans and independent component analysis, meaning brain mapping is giving scientists the data to define the DMN by the areas deactivated during external directed tasks compared to rest.
Pang is particularly interested in creativity, and its relationship to the workday. Like many people, he used to have a romantic view, in which creativity came from chaos, like a lightning bolt of inspiration; now, thinking about the DMN has allowed him to situate creativity in work, active rest and positive routine. This discussion of overwork is from the Strategy and Rest website:
“it’s bad for people, bad for companies, and ultimately counterproductive.
The good news is, it doesn’t have to be this way. Companies can be more productive, more sustainable, and happier places; attract and retain great workers; encourage better collaboration and creativity between workers; and remove the structural obstacles that make it harder for women to rise in their workplaces and professions.
How? By shortening the workweek.
Companies around the world, in a variety of industries, have redesigned their workdays, allowing them to work less while doing more, and giving back time to workers. Maybe it’s time for you to join that movement, too.”
Pang is quite understandably evangelical here; he needs to be. While, as discussed above, there has been some ground gained in the last 18 months in the battle to prevent us all working ourselves to death, and while it’s certainly true that wellbeing is being discussed in the boardroom more than ever, there is still a long way to go before work becomes optimised via more space being given for that which is not work, but which is still creative, active and restful.