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nothing, your brain is doing nothing. There are many reasons why these assumptions were and still are hard to dislodge; one of the most powerful is that it is convenient to assume that everything that happens outside carefully-controlled experimental events is noise that the scientist can safely ignore. Another reason may be that most psychologists and neuroscientists tend to be resistant to ideas about brain function that originate from sources outside their fields. The default mode network fits snugly into what is called complexity theory, which we will return to in Chapter 5 .
    But it turns out that the brain is not just sitting there waiting for the next stimulation. Rather, the brain is perpetually and spontaneously active. It is maintaining, interpreting, responding, and predicting. In fact, the brain uses more energy for spontaneous, intrinsic activity than for accomplishing specific tasks such as multiplying eight and seven, or filling in the cells of a spreadsheet. According to renowned neuroscientist György Buzáki, professor at the Rutgers Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience , most of the brain’s activity is generated from within. External inputs usually cause only minor perturbations from the brain’s internally controlled program. Make no mistake: external perturbations are critical in order for the brain to develop normally. No brain can develop in isolation; the brain needs to be “calibrated” to the external world through experience. Nevertheless, the brain as a complex system keeps itself in balance through self-generated patterns. As I mentioned, the concepts behind these insights into brain function come from fields outside psychology and neuroscience, such as complex systems science and physics. We are just beginning to understand what the brain’s spontaneous activity really means. We explore the resting brain and its role in creativity in more detail in Chapter 2 and Chapter 6 .
    What emerges, though, is the idea that perceptions, memories, associations and thoughts may need a resting mind in order to make their way through our brain and form new connections. Eastern traditions have been aware of this through meditative practices for thousands of years. In Buddhism, monks train to calm their minds. Western society has instilled in us a belief that every moment of every day must be filled with activity. Indeed, it is almost a moral obligation in the US to be as busy as possible. I will try to show that for certain things the brain likes to do (for example, coming up with creative “outside of the box” solutions) you may need to be doing very little.
    When your brain is bombarded with stimuli like emails, phone calls, text messages, Facebook updates, errands, driving around, talking to your boss, checking your to-do list, etc., it is kept busy responding to what neuroscientist Scott Makeig, director of the Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience in La Jolla, California, calls “the challenge of the moment.” Clearly, it is very important to be able to respond to the moment. Sometimes our survival depends on the ability to successfully meet this challenge. However, if that moment becomes every minute of every day of every month of every year, your brain has no time left over to make novel connections between seemingly unrelated things, find patterns, and have new ideas. In other words, to be creative.
    Thinkers such as Bertrand Russell, Rilke, and Oscar Wilde may have been tapping into something that is only now being revealed by modern neuroscience. Each of these thinkers, and many more, asserted throughout their lives that each person could only reach his or her potential through leisure. That may sound paradoxical; after all, we are taught from a very young age some variation of “the Devil finds work for idle hands.” But given the view of our brains that is emerging from modern neuroscience, it may be no accident that as our working