British neuroscientists have found that when we perform a complex but well-mastered task, consciousness "turns off" and the network of the passive mode of the brain comes into operation.
When we swim, drive a car, tie our shoelaces or walk the familiar road to the subway, we do not think about how to do it: the brain performs a well-mastered task without our conscious participation and automatically processes the incoming information. At such moments, its work is coordinated by the network of the passive mode of operation of the brain (Default Mode Network, DMN) - this is the conclusion of scientists from the University of Cambridge, whose article was published in the journal PNAS.
The network of neurons DMN is active when a person is inactive, resting calmly, and his head is not occupied with any specific task. The functions of such “rest networks” remain poorly understood. According to some assumptions, the DMN may be involved in the work of memories, creating an emotional background and / or building plans. According to others, she is responsible for self-awareness.
This hypothesis has become especially widespread, despite the fact that DMN is no less active in those who are unlikely to have self-awareness - in laboratory rodents and in infants. Their DMN activity may indicate an even more fundamental importance of these networks, important not only for humans. Cambridge neuroscientist Deniz Vatansever and his colleagues suggested that DMN is necessary to perform tasks that do not require complex analysis and solutions, those that have already been repeatedly tried and brought to automatism.
To test this idea, the authors gathered 28 volunteers and offered them a simple card game in which a person received four cards and had to put the fifth on whichever of four matches it. The “key” of correspondence was not named - it could be the color of the card or its shape, etc. After a series of attempts, people easily found the desired option, and the scientists observed the activity of their brain in a tomograph.
At first, the patterns of activity were characteristic of the learning brain, but over time, when a person finally learned the rules of the game and began to perform actions automatically, without thinking, their reactions became faster and more accurate, and the brain activity more and more resembled a “simple” DMN. By the way, this may explain why sometimes the sudden attention of our consciousness, directed to a routine task (“How do I do this?”), Interferes with its implementation.
Sergey Vasiliev
