There’s this quiet overlap between what contemplatives have called "stillness" for millennia and what cognitive neuroscientists are now mapping with fMRI. Specifically, the default mode network. When I first read about the DMN, I immediately recognized it as the seat of the inner narrator—the voice that constantly compares, judges, and simulates past/future scenarios. Jung would probably point to this as the rigid grip of the ego, constantly defending against the shadow.

I recall reading Michael Greco’s research at Weill Cornell, where they used TMS to temporarily dampen activity in the DMN’s key hubs. The result? Participants reported a sudden drop in self-referential chatter, and their creative problem-solving scores spiked. It’s lab evidence for what monks and meditators already knew: quiet the judge, and insight just shows up uninvited.

In my own practice, this maps perfectly to the Hanged Man archetype. You’re not trying to force an answer. You’re just suspending the usual cognitive machinery long enough for something else to surface. When the DMN quiets down, I don’t feel "empty." I feel porous. The rigid boundary between observer and observed softens. That’s why I lean toward panpsychism—it makes sense that consciousness isn’t generated by the DMN’s constant output. The network is just a filter. Turn down the volume, and you’re not losing awareness; you’re shedding the cognitive bias that says "I" have to be the center of it all.

I’m curious if anyone else has noticed this shift in their meditation or tarot spreads? Does quieting that inner critic feel like death of the ego, or just a necessary clearing of the deck?

(There's a deeper dive on this in our wiki: Physiognomy: The Ancient Art of Reading Faces — And Why It Fell Out of Favor | Mystic Wiki.)