Two Totally Different Default Modes Of The Brain

Thursday, 23 October 2025, 10:13 am
Opinion: Martin LeFevre - Meditations

An insight from neuroscience may resolve the supposedly “hard problem of consciousness.” People experimenting with therapeutic psychedelics appear to have demonstrated it as well, as have people prone to mystical experiences across cultures and times. It’s called “the default mode network.”

The way Michael Pollen, a leading proponent of therapeutic psychedelics puts it, “The default mode network is involved in creating the projection and illusion that we have a separate self and ego.”

“To the extent that the self has an address in the brain,” he adds, it’s in this network.”

In other words, our vaunted “subjectivity,” the so-called hard problem of consciousness, may be little more than a synaptic vicious circle that sustains our sense of self and ego.

If so, the self is merely a default mode that makes us think we have personal subjectivity, when in actuality there is no such thing.

Many people on psychedelics such as psilocybin or ayahuasca report their sense of self “completely melting away.”

So neuroscientific research, and the supervised use of psychedelics appear to confirm a phenomenon that occurs in the brains of adept meditators: the dissolution of ego, which allows direct perception of the actuality of wholeness and with it a feeling of unity with nature and humanity.

As Pollen has reported from his own experience using psychedelics, there is “a transcendence of space and time, and a feeling of merging with something higher.”

“I suddenly saw myself from the outside, and saw myself explode in this cloud of blue post-it notes,” Pollen said in amusingly describing the dissolution of the self within him while on a carefully administered psychedelic trip.

Psychedelics been shown to be helpful with people who have severe emotional blocks or mental illness, as well as relieving the fears and terrors of cancer and terminally ill patients. But as someone who has experienced altered states of consciousness since I was 18 without taking psychedelics, I question the value of using these substances for spiritual advancement.

Of course, many indigenous peoples have used mind-altering substances found in nature to produce visions and altered states. For people today however, living in increasingly dysfunctional cultures and with little contact with nature, the benefit is mainly therapeutic.

In colloquial terms, the default mode network is a sophisticated term for the choosing, chattering mind, which psilocybin and other substances temporarily shuts down, allowing direct perception and insight.

For spiritual and philosophical reasons however, my focus is on “the default mode network” irrespective of psychedelics.

Clearly, the default mode network that sustains the sense of “me” is a deeply embedded pattern and habit in the brain, probably extending back tens of thousands of years to the emergence of “fully modern humans.”

The self must have had evolutionary utility, enabling early humans to stand apart from nature and actively look for and accumulate knowledge of new resources, but it has become more and more disordered.

My question is: Can the false default mode of the ego end, and be replaced by a true default mode of attentiveness and stillness?

That would not only allow for individual spiritual advancement through negation, but would also radically change human consciousness as we know it.

The root of social division and conflict, and ecological fragmentation and destruction is psychological separateness.

Beneath the progressive critique of capitalism and its controlling billionaire clique, would man’s escalating fragmentation of the earth and humanity cease with the ending, in enough human beings, of the illusion of a separate self and ego?

Man, the rapacious primate, wiped out, through competition or conflict, every other less cognitively complex human species he encountered. Not just Neanderthals, but Denisovans, “Hobbits,” and even a parent branch of our species, Homo erectus, which left Africa long before Homo sapiens.

Understandably therefore, the term, “default mode of the brain” carries with it an implication of almost being hard-wired with a primal neurological pattern of psychological separation. Even though our default mode is very ancient however, I’m sure it’s more habitual than hard-wired.

So again: Is there a default mode of attentiveness that allows direct perception of the inherent newness of life every day, which means that our experience is no longer totally mediated by memory, symbol and the separateness of the self?

And is such a state, even if it has to be renewed every day, synonymous with what ancient Indian, Chinese and Japanese masters called “enlightenment” and “illumination?”

I propose that it is, and that neuroscientific research, therapeutic psychedelics, and the global interest in meditation and mystical experiences are converging, even as the darkness in human consciousness is increasing and driving us to radically change.

We’re in a race with ourselves, and the outcome is uncertain. The living generations may well determine the fate and future of humanity.

It’s a summer-like fall day in northern California. The native Valley Oaks have turned yellow, and most of the big sycamores have shed their leaves, which lie in brown bundles on the ground.

People are out in droves in the parkland on a beautiful afternoon before predicted rains. They are slow or fleet of foot, on bikes and the occasional electric scooter. The area around the last site of Lower Park is quiet however, and the diminished creek languidly but audibly flows by below me.

At first I feel a little uncharacteristically self-conscious, sensing that people going by are wondering what this man is doing just sitting there watching. But self-consciousness soon dissolves with the self in passive watchfulness.

A sentence I read this morning comes to mind. Beyond the words, one experiences the truth of it: “The ending of thought and the beginning of the new is meditation.”

Martin LeFevre

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Martin LeFevre - Meditations

Scoop Contributor

Martin LeFevre is a contemplative and philosopher.

His sui generis “Meditations” explore spiritual, philosophical and political questions relating to the polycrisis facing humanity.

lefevremartin77@gmail