![]() ![]() You get the idea - it's a fork, but we can use it for a multitude of other things. We might come up with things like:Ī musical instrument - think twanging the tinesĭip it in paint and use it to create interesting designs with the tines įor example a participant might be asked to come up with alternate uses for a fork. A common divergent thinking assessment is the alternate use task - which is where participants are asked to find novel uses for common objects. I don't know about you but that sounds fairly ADHD to me. This is also related to divergent thinking, which is about fully exploring ideas, creating unexpected connections, and spontaneity. These are two features of the DMN - there is some evidence that letting our minds wander enhances our creative abilities. Some of the characteristics most admired about ADHD are our creative abilities and ability to connect ideas. Now this isn't to say that our wandering minds are all bad. I'm not sure I'd go that far, but I do think it explains a ton about how our brains work and why we do some of the things we do. There are even scientists that believe that this decoupling of networks is a better metric to explain the symptoms and impairments of ADHD. ![]() Our brain simply hasn't disengaged the parts that let our focus wander. ![]() This is why it is so easy for us to get pulled away in our thoughts when we're doing something else. Our default mode network doesn't have the same inverse relationship to the task-positive network. What this means is that when we're engaged with a task is that we should see less activation in our default mode network - at least in neurotypicals.Īs we've all experienced, this is not the case for ADHD. It is inversely correlated to another network called the task-positive network which is associate with the regions of the brain that are active when we're engaged with attention-demanding tasks. With that said, the default mode network is another of these large-scale brain networks and it is primarily active when someone is in a wakeful rest state - so it's what's active while we're doing things like daydreaming or letting our mind-wander. But as more of these large-scale brain networks have been discovered it is leading more credence to the idea. Although research has been piling up in support of the network there are still some who believe these brain states can be explained with simpler ideas. By having various regions of the brain fire together we can create more complex functions - for example, our vision requires a number of regions of the brain to fire together to create what we see.īefore we get too far here I also want to mention that the Default Mode Network is fairly recent science - while ideas about the DMN go as far back as 1929, it didn't get a name until 2001. Let's get a little neurosciency here - brain networks are collections of brain-regions that activate together to perform various cognitive functions. I've certainly had my fair share of listening to podcasts and finding myself getting caught up on something said and then five minutes later realize that the podcast was still playing and I have no idea what they just said.Ī big part of this is what's known as the default mode network. Mind wandering is a fairly common condition with ADHD - our thoughts can kind of just take over a lead us away from what we were doing.
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