After providing all the funding for The Brain from Top to Bottom for over 10 years, the CIHR Institute of Neurosciences, Mental Health and Addiction informed us that because of budget cuts, they were going to be forced to stop sponsoring us as of March 31st, 2013.

We have approached a number of organizations, all of which have recognized the value of our work. But we have not managed to find the funding we need. We must therefore ask our readers for donations so that we can continue updating and adding new content to The Brain from Top to Bottom web site and blog.

Please, rest assured that we are doing our utmost to continue our mission of providing the general public with the best possible information about the brain and neuroscience in the original spirit of the Internet: the desire to share information free of charge and with no adverstising.

Whether your support is moral, financial, or both, thank you from the bottom of our hearts!

Bruno Dubuc, Patrick Robert, Denis Paquet, and Al Daigen




Tuesday, 6 January 2015
Literary Activity and the Default Mode Network

In every human culture, much of life revolves around the stories that we tell—about the world around us, about other people, and about ourselves. When you come right down to it, just like traditional oral storytelling, that is all that modern literature and film do today. There must be something in the brain that resonates especially strongly with the narrative process.

That something might well resemble what neuroscientists call the the brain’s default mode network: the particular set of brain structures whose activity increases by default, when someone is doing absolutely nothing.

But as these structures have been studied more and more using functional brain imaging techniques, and as more meta-analyses have been performed on existing studies (such as the meta-analysis published by Richard J.S. Wise and Rodrigo M. Braga in December 2011), researchers have increasingly come to recognize that this default mode network is also activated in various situations in which we are not really so idle as all that. In fact, scientists are beginning to understand that this network is associated with what is commonly called introspection: thinking about ourselves, about other people, about what we have done, and about what we are going to do.

In their study, Wise and Braga found that the default mode network and other brain structures become active when subjects are presented with spoken or written versions of a story. These other structures include not only the sensory (auditory and visual) areas that are directly involved in hearing or reading a story and that converge on the brain’s language network (“bottom-up” brain activity), but also the brain networks that we use to make inferences, to remember, to imagine, and to be creative—“top-down” brain activities that are just as essential for understanding a story.

Wise and Braga find that these other brain structures interact functionally with the default mode network to perform a task that is highly complex but that we carry out effortlessly all the time: understanding stories when they are told to us.

i_lien Default mode network: the seat of literary creativity?
a_exp Default Mode Network: The Seat Of Literary Creativity?

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