How We Make the Decisions that Matter the Most

What does the “resting brain” look like? If you want to map mental activities to regions of the brain, you need this answer to serve as a baseline. Yet when researchers in the 1990s instructed people to think about nothing in particular, their brains lit up in a regular pattern on PET and fMRI to a surprising degree. Moreover, they were using the parts of their brains least developed in nonhuman primates. Apparently, when nothing is happening, we engage in especially sophisticated forms of thinking—namely, thinking about what is not happening: daydreaming, strategizing, or solving hypothetical problems.