see Shankar introduces it by saying you've conducted a number of neuroimaging studies of people who have experienced or are currently experiencing depression. You put them in an fMRI scanner in your lab so you can see what's going on in their brains. In one study, you put people in this brain scanner and you ask them to watch very sad film clips. What were these clips and what did you find norm? And he says, yes, in order to be a good prediction machine, the name of the game for the brain is to associate whatever is happening in your momentary experience with other past events so that you can contextualize and interpret those events. This is why we think we see the default mode network activating lighting up in the scanner when people are exposed to sadness, we show them themes of loss. We show clips from Terms of Endearment. The mother's saying goodbye to her kids because she has terminal cancer. For instance, the brain is sort of saying, Okay, I'm getting this interpersonal interaction happening. What's happening here? Or a mother is sick and she's having to say goodbye to her kids, and we immediately relate that to our own experiences of loss, of having to say goodbye to loved ones, of the fragility of life, of our own severed relationships. This helps us go from just seeing pixels moving around on a screen to really feeling like immersed in a story. That's why we enjoy stories so much, because they aren't just about the protagonist in the story, they're about us. Of course, everything's about us, and that's the default mode. And so they looked, just to summarize a little bit here, they looked for maybe people prone to depression have a bigger activation of the default mode network, but they didn't. There wasn't any difference whether they were prone to depression or not. So he had the bright idea to look elsewhere, and he saw, he said, where we actually saw less activity during sad films compared to neutral films, we saw that it was parts of our brain that represent what's happening in our bodies that tended to be turning off. So there are parts of the brain that we know across almost every person represents what's happening on the surface of your body. There's a circuit for that, the region for that. And we know there are parts of the brain that represent the internal feelings state of the body. It's all these different feeling states, and it was these regions that were deactivating response to the sad film clips. And what really convinced me there was a story here, because this is not how I think even the general scientific community would think of depression, vulnerability still thought of as being the triggering of threat signals that then trigger you into your defensive habits. So what really convinced me that this was important was when we looked at what parts of the brain had activity that correlated with or helped us predict whether someone was depressed or not, and it was this pattern of deactivation in body representation regions that was significantly associated with whether people depressed or not, and it did not seem diagnostic, diagnostic To look at differences in how much people were activating the default mode network. It just seemed that what might be pathological or harmful is doing this, that it activating that network thinking about things related to yourself, to the exclusion of continuing to. Process and update yourself with information about how your body is feeling. You see this so often with people who are depressed, don't you? Where good news just doesn't penetrate, the story has become so consuming that they've cut off input. It happens to all of us to one degree or another. You lose touch with everything that's going on. We're just lost in our anger, our grief, our despair. It's easy to see with anger, almost everybody gets angry, right? You definitely shut down when you're in the midst of justified rage, and yet, at that point, there's all sorts of things to pay attention to, aren't there? Your heart is thumping, face is flushed, feel prickly. It's it's, it's, it changes things. When your default to one extent or another is to feel that, to know that, begin to look for that, sometimes there are things that we dread that we don't want to do. Feel that pain in the pit of your stomach, feel your heart beating a little too hard, and usually our response is to run away, get out of that situation. Think about something else. What happens when we actually tune in and see what's going on? Want to read something that Pema Chodron wrote. She's a Vajrayana teacher. It's a monastery in Nova Scotia.