Default mode network (DMN) refers to a constellation of brain areas that show reduced activity during attention-demanding, externally oriented tasks.
Raichle first named it in 2001, and interest in it has grown fast.
Researchers now understand it to reflect the brain’s ‘intrinsic’ activity, studied mainly through resting-state brain imaging.
This includes self-referential thought, reminiscing, and future planning (Davey, Pujol and Harrison, 2016; Smallwood et al., 2021).
Where is the Default Mode Network in the Brain?
The DMN is distributed across three major subdivisions (Raichle, 2015):
- Ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC),
- Dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC),
- Posterior hub including the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), adjacent precuneus and angular gyrus (Figure 1).
In resting functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) studies, these regions show coordinated temporal activity. This is a known feature of large-scale brain networks (Greicius et al., 2003).
The vmPFC is an integration area.
It is involved in the generation and regulation of emotions, the attribution of reward value to stimuli, value-based decision-making, and various aspects of social cognition (Mayeli et al., 2020).
Overall, it plays an important modulatory role when coping with adverse conditions, and it regulates motivational drive in favor of goal-oriented behaviors.
The dmPFC has often been linked to self-referential judgments in the present. It is activated by attention-demanding tasks that require a person to reflect on their own psychological state, or on someone else’s (Denny et al., 2012).
The PCC and medial precuneus, along with the angular gyrus, support the recollection of past experiences. This includes autobiographical information and previously studied items.
This process is mediated by functional coupling with the medial temporal lobe and hippocampus.
Both structures are sensitive to the daily accumulation of experience and support the memory-based construction of future scenarios (Andrews-Hanna et al., 2010; Shannon et al., 2013).
Distance matters here too. The DMN sits at a functional and spatial distance from more extrinsically driven brain networks, such as the sensorimotor system.
This distance supports the idea that the DMN handles higher-order, abstract cognition, often disconnected from events in the immediate environment (Smallwood et al., 2021).
What is the Role of the Default Mode Network?
Self-reflection
The DMN was first identified at rest, in contrast with ‘task-positive’ networks. Because of this, its function has often been linked to spontaneous, self-referential thought that contributes to our sense of self and identity (Yeshurun, Nguyen, and Hasson, 2021).
In fMRI studies, subjects made self-referential judgments about trait adjectives. This activated the PCC and medial PFC, compared with control conditions involving resting-state and non-self-referential tasks (Whitfield-Gabrieli et al., 2011; Davey, Pujol and Harrison, 2016).
In addition, spontaneous electroencephalography (EEG) studies investigating areas of the DMN could predict individual differences in the frequency of engagement in introspective thoughts (Frewen et al., 2020).
Memories
The ability of the DMN to retrieve previously encoded information is related to its functional connectivity to areas of the medial temporal lobe that are crucial for learning and memory.
Autobiographical remembering, and interpreting new stimuli using past knowledge, activates midline DMN regions.
This activation is linked to increased connectivity with hippocampal regions, a key area for learning and memory (Chen et al., 2016; Spreng and Grady, 2010).
Memory retrieval also matters for decision-making.
Feedback and learning from past experience, accumulated through the DMN’s retrieval role, can guide future behaviour (Buckner and Wheeler, 2001).
Daydreaming
Humans spend nearly half their time on stimulus-independent thought. This includes daydreaming and mind-wandering about plans, everyday concerns, and past experience, and it reliably engages the DMN (Fox et al., 2015).
DMN connectivity shifts as daydreaming fluctuates. Moment-to-moment changes in DMN coupling track these fluctuating states, and people differ in how often they daydream day to day (Kucyi and Davis, 2014).
Daydreaming usually serves a purpose. It supports everyday autobiographical planning: greater DMN engagement, together with medial temporal areas, is tied to more frequent future-oriented thought (Andrews-Hanna et al., 2010).
Social evaluations
Many studies show DMN regions activate when people try to understand or interact with others. This includes interpreting others’ mental states, inferring intentions and beliefs, and evaluating their behavior.
The vmPFC and its connections with affective regions support general emotional engagement in social settings. In turn, vmPFC-PCC connectivity helps distinguish self from other.
For example, it is active when people attribute qualities and feelings to themselves or to others (Frewen et al., 2020).
The dmPFC’s connections with the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) play a crucial role in theory of mind, attributing mental states like beliefs and desires to ourselves and others.
People use this to interpret others’ mental states and predict their desires and behavior (Li, Mai, and Liu, 2014).
How Does Meditation Affect the Default Mode Network?
As opposed to states of mind-wandering, meditation involves maintaining attention to the present moment, on purpose and non-judgementally (Bishop et al., 2004).
How Meditation Changes DMN Activity
During meditation, people learn to notice self-related thoughts, emotions, and body sensations. They learn to separate feeling from self-identifying.
This builds emotion regulation, focused attention, and a shift in self-perspective. Greater activation of prefrontal areas linked to executive control and self-monitoring is expected as a result.
This is not passive relaxation. Meditation trains sustained, effortful attention, which is why it recruits brain systems for executive control rather than switching them off.
Over time, this loosens mind-wandering’s grip on attention. Spontaneous, self-generated thought is itself closely tied to DMN activity.
This distinguishes meditation from ordinary rest, where the mind is free to wander without any such training. That is why the practice itself, not rest alone, draws such interest from DMN researchers.
Evidence From Brain-Imaging Studies
This is exactly what fMRI studies of experienced meditators have found. A stronger coupling of prefrontal regions appears alongside deactivation of DMN nodes, probably due to reduced mind-wandering (Brewer et al., 2011).
This holds across styles. Focused attention, mantra recitation, and loving-kindness practice all reduce DMN activity, and DMN fluctuation tracks how focused a person is.
One fMRI study asked meditators to press a button whenever they noticed they were distracted. These moments meant greater DMN activity (Hasenkamp and Barsalou, 2012).
Over the longer term, meditation weakens connectivity between DMN regions involved in self-referential processing and emotional appraisal (Taylor et al., 2013; Simon and Engström, 2015). Clinicians can track this shift to monitor meditation’s therapeutic effects over time.
The Role of the Default Mode Network in Disorders
Some disorders share a common thread. They involve poor coordination between the DMN, a control network, and a salience network that flags what matters and shifts attention inward or outward.
This “triple-network” framework helps explain why DMN changes appear across such different conditions.
Alzheimer’s Disease
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a progressive condition primarily linked to memory loss. It has a distinct molecular signature.
AD involves a buildup of amyloid-β plaques and tau tangles (protein clumps that disrupt normal neuron function), mainly in the medial cortical regions and hippocampus (Braak and Braak, 1991).
These same regions support normal DMN function, so AD-related changes there are thought to alter DMN activity too. One finding stands out.
Impaired functional connectivity between the PCC and hippocampus has been detected in AD, probably reflecting hippocampal structural change (Sherr et al., 2021).
Studies of amnestic cognitive impairment (aMCI), a stage that can precede AD, found similar though milder PCC-hippocampus desynchronization compared with normal aging (Mevel et al., 2011). Task-switching is affected too.
Delayed switching between resting-state and task-related brain function has been linked to inefficient synchronization of DMN areas in both AD and aMCI (Rombouts et al., 2005).
Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia is a complex psychiatric disorder.
It involves altered perception, delusions, cognitive deficits, and abnormal emotion regulation.
Many fMRI studies have found altered DMN connectivity with other brain areas in people with schizophrenia, linked to both positive and negative symptoms (Hu et al., 2017).
This has treatment implications too.
Increased DMN connectivity has also been found in patients and their unaffected siblings.
This suggests that hyper-connectivity of intrinsic brain networks may be an endophenotype of the illness (Liu et al., 2012).
Preliminary findings point to DMN connectivity as a potential treatment target for future antipsychotic drugs, though more research on DMN’s response to medication is needed (Hu et al., 2017).
ADHD
Clinical deficits in ADHD, including problems with attention and impulsivity, have been linked to delayed maturation of the DMN. ADHD studies consistently show increased functional connectivity within the DMN and across the whole brain.
The reverse holds elsewhere. Connectivity between the DMN and task-positive networks, such as the ventral attentional and frontoparietal systems, shows delays instead (Sripada, Kessler, and Angstadt, 2014).
Abnormal DMN connectivity with attentional-control areas has also been found in adults with ADHD, supporting the maturational-delay hypothesis.
However, the contribution of other intellectual impairments, often present in co-morbidity with ADHD, still needs to be clarified (Harikumar et al., 2021).
Depression
One defining feature of depression is brooding rumination: a passive, recurrent focus on depressed mood and its consequences (Treynor, Gonzalez, and Nolen-Hoeksema, 2003).
Several fMRI studies have identified DMN areas critically involved in ruminative processes. Specifically, the dmPFC and its connections activate when people reflect on their own psychological state and ruminate about past adverse events (Zhou et al., 2020).
Connectivity changes go further. In major depressive disorder, connectivity also increases between the DMN and the subgenual prefrontal cortex (sgPFC), an area involved in appraising negative emotion and behavioral withdrawal (Hamilton et al., 2015).
This has shaped new treatments. Novel therapies now use transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to inhibit DMN activity and restore normal connectivity, reducing depressive rumination (Liston et al., 2014).
Critical Evaluation
The DMN has reshaped how psychologists think about the resting brain, but it is not without limitations. Four points are worth weighing carefully.
How the DMN Was Discovered
Aim: Raichle et al. (2001) had a puzzle.
Certain brain regions reliably reduced activity during goal-directed tasks, and no one knew why.
Method: Using PET scans, the team measured blood flow and oxygen use across the brain.
They pooled data from many tasks to find regions that reliably reduced activity compared with quiet rest.
Findings: The results were clear.
Oxygen use was uniform across the resting brain, confirming rest as a valid baseline.
A specific set of medial regions, including the PCC and medial prefrontal cortex, consistently deactivated whenever attention turned outward.
Conclusion: In short, the brain has a default mode.
This organised baseline supports internal thought and is temporarily suspended during external tasks, giving the field both a name and a physiological basis for the DMN.
The study was transformative.
But it has limits: PET has poor time resolution, and it shows only that regions deactivate together, not that they form one network.
Proof of a real network came later, from resting-state connectivity studies.
Built on Correlational Evidence
A second finding deepened the picture. Fox et al. (2005) showed that the DMN and “task-positive” attention networks are anticorrelated: when one rises in activity, the other tends to fall, even at rest.
This built the opposition between outward attention and inward thought into the brain’s intrinsic organisation.
The finding is influential, but contested. Removing the brain’s average “global” signal during preprocessing can artificially push correlations negative, and critics argued some of the original anticorrelation was an artefact of this choice.
Later work found the anticorrelation survives without that step, so the effect is now considered real, though its exact size depends on analysis choices.
More broadly, the DMN is defined mainly through correlation. That makes its precise causal role in any single function hard to pin down.
One Network, an Expanding List of Functions
A third concern is scope. The DMN has been linked to self-reference, memory, mind-wandering, and theory of mind, among other functions, and that breadth risks turning it into a catch-all explanation.
Buckner et al. (2008) proposed that a single principle, constructive simulation, ties these functions together. But an account broad enough to unify daydreaming, memory, and social cognition is also broad enough to be difficult to falsify against narrower, competing explanations (Smallwood et al., 2021).
Contemporary Research
Depression evidence stands out most.
Aim: Zhou et al. (2020) set out to quantify, across many brain-imaging studies, how strongly rumination relates to the DMN.
Method: The team ran a coordinate-based meta-analysis, pooling the brain coordinates reported across many independent studies of rumination to find regions of convergent evidence. The pattern was clear.
Findings: Rumination consistently mapped onto the core DMN, especially the medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, and angular gyrus. This DMN-linked circuitry overlapped with the regions typically implicated in depression.
Conclusion: DMN abnormality is a robust, cross-study marker of rumination and a plausible mechanism linking self-focused thought to depression.
Every study has limits. As a meta-analysis, this one pools peak coordinates rather than raw brain images, and it cannot show that DMN engagement causes rumination.
Its strength is convergence across many independent studies, which is more reliable than any single resting-state experiment.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the default mode network active during sleep?
fMRI studies have shown the persistence of DMN connectivity during light sleep, probably reflecting the permanence of self-reflective thoughts that gradually decrease as a person falls asleep (Horovitz et al., 2009).
In later stages of sleep, changes in consciousness produce a reduction in functional correlations between frontal and posterior regions of DMN regions, finally resulting in mPFC decoupling from the rest of the DMN.
Overall, this evidence supports the hypothesis that integrated DMN activity is necessary to promote ongoing mentation and conscious awareness.
What is the role of the default mode network during creative activities?
Creativity is increasingly acknowledged as a process involving both idea generation and idea evaluation.
During the generation phase, subjects were asked to convert conventional mental schemas into alternative ones or to create multiple solutions to a problem. Activation was observed within the DMN and areas supporting novel combinations of associations, such as the insula and hippocampus (Kleinmintz, Ivancovsky, and Shamay-Tsoory, 2019).
In the evaluation phase, the involvement of executive control processes is crucial to support the rejection of inappropriate and non-original ideas.
Specifically, interactions between frontoparietal regions and correlations with DMN activity can support working memory processes that facilitate shifting between different types of thinking modes (Heinonen et al., 2016).
How can the default mode network be deactivated?
Relaxation techniques, including mindfulness meditation and breathing exercises, can help reduce DMN activity, dampening the impact of self-reflective thoughts and resulting in increased present-moment awareness (Brewer et al., 2011).
Engaging in hobbies and novel activities can also induce a shift in thought processes, contributing to an increase in a person’s sense of self-worth and self-efficacy.
Finally, engaging in social interactions can help the person assume alternative points of view on problems and disengage from passive, ruminative problem-solving tendencies (Yeshurun, Nguyen, and Hasson, 2021).
Key Takeaways
- Discovery: The DMN was named by Raichle et al. (2001), who showed that specific medial brain regions quiet down whenever attention turns to an external task.
- Anatomy: Its main hubs are the medial prefrontal cortex, the posterior cingulate cortex and precuneus, and the angular gyrus, working together with the hippocampus.
- Function: The DMN underlies self-referential thought, autobiographical memory, mind-wandering, and understanding other people’s mental states.
- Disorders: DMN changes appear across depression, Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia, and ADHD, though the same pattern shows up in strikingly different conditions.
- Meditation: Regular meditation practice reliably lowers DMN activity and strengthens prefrontal control over it.
- Caveat: Most DMN evidence is correlational, so its exact causal role in any one function is still not fully settled.
References
Andrews-Hanna, J. R., Reidler, J. S., Sepulcre, J., Poulin, R., & Buckner, R. L. (2010). Functional-anatomic fractionation of the brain’s default network. Neuron, 65(4), 550-562.
Bishop, S. R., Lau, M., Shapiro, S., Carlson, L., Anderson, N. D., Carmody, J., … & Devins, G. (2004). Mindfulness: A proposed operational definition. Clinical psychology: Science and practice, 11(3), 230.
Braak, H., & Braak, E. (1991). Neuropathological stageing of Alzheimer-related changes. Acta neuropathologica, 82(4), 239-259.
Brewer, J. A., Worhunsky, P. D., Gray, J. R., Tang, Y. Y., Weber, J., & Kober, H. (2011). Meditation experience is associated with differences in default mode network activity and connectivity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(50), 20254-20259.
Buckner, R. L., & Wheeler, M. E. (2001). The cognitive neuroscience of remembering. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2(9), 624-634.
Chen, J., Honey, C. J., Simony, E., Arcaro, M. J., Norman, K. A., & Hasson, U. (2016). Accessing real-life episodic information from minutes versus hours earlier modulates hippocampal and high-order cortical dynamics. Cerebral cortex, 26(8), 3428-3441.
Davey, C. G., Pujol, J., & Harrison, B. J. (2016). Mapping the self in the brain’s default mode network. Neuroimage, 132, 390-397.
Denny, B. T., Kober, H., Wager, T. D., & Ochsner, K. N. (2012). A meta-analysis of functional neuroimaging studies of self-and other judgments reveals a spatial gradient for mentalizing in medial prefrontal cortex. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 24(8), 1742-1752.
Fox, K. C., Spreng, R. N., Ellamil, M., Andrews-Hanna, J. R., & Christoff, K. (2015). The wandering brain: Meta-analysis of functional neuroimaging studies of mind-wandering and related spontaneous thought processes. Neuroimage, 111, 611-621.
Fox, M. D., Snyder, A. Z., Vincent, J. L., Corbetta, M., Van Essen, D. C., & Raichle, M. E. (2005). The human brain is intrinsically organized into dynamic, anticorrelated functional networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 102(27), 9673-9678.
Frewen, P., Schroeter, M. L., Riva, G., Cipresso, P., Fairfield, B., Padulo, C., … & Northoff, G. (2020). Neuroimaging the consciousness of self: Review, and conceptual-methodological framework. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 112, 164-212.
Greicius, M. D., Krasnow, B., Reiss, A. L., & Menon, V. (2003). Functional connectivity in the resting brain: a network analysis of the default mode hypothesis. Proceedings of the national academy of sciences, 100(1), 253-258.
Greicius, M. D., Srivastava, G., Reiss, A. L., & Menon, V. (2004). Default-mode network activity distinguishes Alzheimer’s disease from healthy aging: evidence from functional MRI. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 101(13), 4637-4642.
Hamilton, J. P., Farmer, M., Fogelman, P., & Gotlib, I. H. (2015). Depressive rumination, the default-mode network, and the dark matter of clinical neuroscience. Biological psychiatry, 78(4), 224-230.
Harikumar, A., Evans, D. W., Dougherty, C. C., Carpenter, K. L., & Michael, A. M. (2021). A review of the default mode network in autism spectrum disorders and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Brain connectivity, 11(4), 253-263.
Hasenkamp, W., & Barsalou, L. W. (2012). Effects of meditation experience on functional connectivity of distributed brain networks. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 6, 38.
Heinonen, J., Numminen, J., Hlushchuk, Y., Antell, H., Taatila, V., & Suomala, J. (2016). Default mode and executive networks areas: Association with the serial order in divergent thinking. PloS one, 11(9), e0162234.
Horovitz, S. G., Braun, A. R., Carr, W. S., Picchioni, D., Balkin, T. J., Fukunaga, M., & Duyn, J. H. (2009). Decoupling of the brain’s default mode network during deep sleep. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(27), 11376-11381.
Hu, M. L., Zong, X. F., Mann, J. J., Zheng, J. J., Liao, Y. H., Li, Z. C., … & Tang, J. S. (2017). A review of the functional and anatomical default mode network in schizophrenia. Neuroscience Bulletin, 33, 73-84.
Kleinmintz, O. M., Ivancovsky, T., & Shamay-Tsoory, S. G. (2019). The two-fold model of creativity: the neural underpinnings of the generation and evaluation of creative ideas. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 27, 131-138.
Kucyi, A., & Davis, K. D. (2014). Dynamic functional connectivity of the default mode network tracks daydreaming. Neuroimage, 100, 471-480.
Li, W., Mai, X., & Liu, C. (2014). The default mode network and social understanding of others: what do brain connectivity studies tell us. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 8, 74.
Liston, C., Chen, A. C., Zebley, B. D., Drysdale, A. T., Gordon, R., Leuchter, B., … & Dubin, M. J. (2014). Default mode network mechanisms of transcranial magnetic stimulation in depression. Biological psychiatry, 76(7), 517-526.
Liu, H., Kaneko, Y., Ouyang, X., Li, L., Hao, Y., Chen, E. Y., … & Liu, Z. (2012). Schizophrenic patients and their unaffected siblings share increased resting-state connectivity in the task-negative network but not its anticorrelated task-positive network. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 38(2), 285-294.
Mayeli, A., Misaki, M., Zotev, V., Tsuchiyagaito, A., Al Zoubi, O., Phillips, R., … & Bodurka, J. (2020). Self‐regulation of ventromedial prefrontal cortex activation using real‐time fMRI neurofeedback—Influence of default mode network. Human Brain Mapping, 41(2), 342-352.
Mevel, K., Chételat, G., Eustache, F., & Desgranges, B. (2011). The default mode network in healthy aging and Alzheimer’s disease. International Journal of Alzheimer’s disease, 2011.
Raichle, M. E., MacLeod, A. M., Snyder, A. Z., Powers, W. J., Gusnard, D. A., & Shulman, G. L. (2001). A default mode of brain function. Proceedings of the national academy of sciences, 98(2), 676-682.
Rombouts, S. A., Barkhof, F., Goekoop, R., Stam, C. J., & Scheltens, P. (2005). Altered resting state networks in mild cognitive impairment and mild Alzheimer’s disease: an fMRI study. Human brain mapping, 26(4), 231-239.
Shannon, B. J., Dosenbach, R. A., Su, Y., Vlassenko, A. G., Larson-Prior, L. J., Nolan, T. S., … & Raichle, M. E. (2013). Morning-evening variation in human brain metabolism and memory circuits. Journal of Neurophysiology, 109(5), 1444-1456.
Simon, R., & Engström, M. (2015). The default mode network as a biomarker for monitoring the therapeutic effects of meditation. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 776.
Smallwood, J., Bernhardt, B. C., Leech, R., Bzdok, D., Jefferies, E., & Margulies, D. S. (2021). The default mode network in cognition: a topographical perspective. Nature reviews neuroscience, 22(8), 503-513.
Spreng, R. N., & Grady, C. L. (2010). Patterns of brain activity supporting autobiographical memory, prospection, and theory of mind, and their relationship to the default mode network. Journal of cognitive neuroscience, 22(6), 1112-1123.
Sripada, C. S., Kessler, D., & Angstadt, M. (2014). Lag in maturation of the brain’s intrinsic functional architecture in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(39), 14259-14264.
Taylor, V. A., Daneault, V., Grant, J., Scavone, G., Breton, E., Roffe-Vidal, S., … & Beauregard, M. (2013). Impact of meditation training on the default mode network during a restful state. Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 8(1), 4-14.
Treynor, W., Gonzalez, R., & Nolen-Hoeksema, S. (2003). Rumination reconsidered: A psychometric analysis. Cognitive therapy and research, 27, 247-259.
Whitfield-Gabrieli, S., Moran, J. M., Nieto-Castañón, A., Triantafyllou, C., Saxe, R., & Gabrieli, J. D. (2011). Associations and dissociations between default and self-reference networks in the human brain. Neuroimage, 55(1), 225-232.
Yeshurun, Y., Nguyen, M., & Hasson, U. (2021). The default mode network: where the idiosyncratic self meets the shared social world. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 22(3), 181-192.
Zhou, H. X., Chen, X., Shen, Y. Q., Li, L., Chen, N. X., Zhu, Z. C., … & Yan, C. G. (2020). Rumination and the default mode network: Meta-analysis of brain imaging studies and implications for depression. Neuroimage, 206, 116287.
