Welcoming Wisdom #12 - The Pre-Motor Cortex and the Default Mode Network

Our accidental mind is a marvel of evolution—capable of breathtaking creativity, yet vulnerable to distraction, self-deception, and runaway ego. In this week’s Welcoming Wisdom podcast, we explore two unlikely partners in this drama: the premotor cortex and the default mode network (DMN).

• The premotor cortex rehearses actions before we move, allowing us to simulate outcomes and imagine future possibilities.
• The default mode network weaves our sense of self and story, giving us social intelligence while also tempting us into rumination and egocentrism.

Together, they illustrate the double-edged nature of our cognition: the same circuits that enable foresight and empathy can also fuel anxiety, self-absorption, and unintended consequences.

In the episode, I share how understanding these networks helps us manage our minds with greater wisdom. By learning to channel rehearsal toward constructive outcomes and to quiet the DMN’s more ego-driven impulses, we can shape behavior that is virtuous rather than villainous.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 1:22 The Pre-Motor Cortex: The Mind's Rehearsal Stage
• 5:16 The Default Mode Network (DMN)
• 9:10 The Downsides of the DMN
• 13:46 Summation
• 14:40 Conclusion

Transcript

THE PRE-MOTOR CORTEX AND THE DEFAULT MODE NETWORK

Our Mental Rehearsal Space and Whiteboard

Welcome to the Flourish As You Age podcast, where we explore the mind, creative aging, and how mature minds can help shape a kinder, wiser future. I’m Michael C. Patterson. This episode is part of the Welcoming Wisdom series based on my new book of the same name. 

Most recently we have been focusing on sections drawn from the chapter called The Accidental Mind in which I discuss how the human brain is a patchwork of components added at different times for different reasons, often layered one atop another in a way that is functional but far from optimal. The assembled components get the job done, but not without redundancy, inefficiency, and unintended consequences. 

In this episode I want to discuss two of these important components of our accidental brain: the premotor cortex and the Default Mode Network.  The more we understand about how our brain works—both its strengths and weaknesses—the better we can mange it effectively to promote happiness, wellbeing and virtue.

The Premotor Cortex: Our Mental Rehearsal Stage

 In a previous episode we described working memory as the virtual whiteboard of conscious thought - as a limited-capacity system for holding and manipulating information over short periods. 

Using a similar kind of metaphor, we can describe the premotor cortex as the rehearsal stage where our mind runs through possibilities before committing to action. Located just in front of the primary motor cortex, this region is best known for preparing and sequencing movements. But its role extends far beyond physical coordination. It is where the brain simulates actions—testing them in a kind of neural sandbox—before we take them into the world. The premotor cortex is the staging platform for action, where we envision and feel the action before actually moving—before engaging our muscles and sinews.

Athletes intuitively exploit this system when they mentally rehearse a dive, a pole vault, or a gymnastics routine before stepping into motion. 

The same capacity is available to all of us, not only for physical skills but for decisions, conversations, and creative work. Here, in the premotor cortex, we can slow things down, run alternative scenarios, and evaluate outcomes without risk—an essential part of Daniel Kahneman’s “Type Two” thinking, the slow, deliberate mode that supports complex reasoning.

Functionally, the premotor cortex works in concert with working memory and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, feeding on the active information held in awareness and shaping it into action plans. Its simulations draw on the same recurrent loops that make consciousness possible, linking perception, memory, and motor intention in nested cycles of prediction and evaluation. In predictive processing terms, it is a forward model generator: crafting expectations about how actions will unfold and flagging surprises that need conscious attention.

 As our environments have grown more complex and culturally novel, so too has the demand on this system. The premotor cortex now serves not only as a stage for bodily rehearsal, but as a cognitive tool for postformal thinking—the capacity to integrate multiple perspectives, navigate ambiguity, and devise adaptive strategies. It helps us imagine the ripple effects of a policy change, explore the nuances of a moral dilemma, or orchestrate the steps of a creative project.

The image of an athlete poised at the edge of the vault serves as a reminder: we can all benefit from mental rehearsal. Before launching into action—especially in high-stakes decisions—we can step into this inner stage, test our moves, and adjust our course. In a culture that often rewards speed over reflection, the premotor cortex offers us a built-in counterbalance: a space to pause, simulate, and refine before we leap.

If the premotor cortex serves as our rehearsal stage for decisions and actions, the Default Mode Network acts as the playwright and narrator — shaping the story of who we believe we are. Working memory and the premotor cortex handle the logistics of problem-solving and foresight, while the DMN weaves those activities into an ongoing personal narrative Together, these systems form a dynamic partnership: one team — working memory and the premotor cortex — plans, rehearses, and refines our actions, while the other — the Default Mode Network — interprets those actions and integrates them into our ongoing sense of self.

The Double-Edged Sword of the Default Mode Network

The emergence and elaboration of the Default Mode Network (DMN) was one of the most consequential developments in the evolution of the human brain. The DMN a constellation of brain regions that become active when we are not focused on external tasks — when we are at rest, daydreaming, remembering the past, imagining the future, or reflecting on ourselves. 

Often referred to as the “resting state” network, the DMN is anything but idle. It is, in fact, the seat of the wandering mind — and possibly the evolutionary crucible of self-awareness: our sense of being an individual, distinct from others. In its more positive, adaptive form, this self-sense allows us to successfully interact with others and navigate our social worlds. In its less positive manifestations, it fosters self-absorption that separates, even alienates us from other people, from the natural world, and from the flow of existence itself.

While other mammals display precursors of the DMN, its degree of connectivity and activity in the human brain is without peer. Its hubs include the medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, and angular gyrus — areas heavily involved in self-referential thought, autobiographical memory, social cognition, and moral reasoning.

 The DMN allows us to mentally simulate future scenarios, adopt another’s perspective, revisit past events, and weave these elements into a coherent narrative identity. These powers are foundational to metacognition and meta-awareness — the capacity to think about thinking, to be aware of ourselves as selves.

From an evolutionary perspective, the DMN likely conferred enormous adaptive advantages. The ability to anticipate outcomes, reflect on social interactions, and plan for the long term enabled more sophisticated social organization, cooperative behavior, and cultural transmission. This growing “inner space” contributed to what some thinkers — such as Julian Jaynes, who contrasted the impersonal voices of gods in the Iliad with the self-reflective narration of the Odyssey, and Karl Jaspers, who described an “overwhelming plenitude of spiritual creations” — have identified as a major shift in human consciousness.

The Downsides of the DMN 

Yet these cognitive gifts came at a cost. The DMN, for all its creative potential, is also the source of rumination, worry, regret, self-judgment, and recursive loops of thought that can spiral into anxiety and depression. It generates the illusion of a stable, continuous self, which can be useful in practical life — but it also drives suffering by making us cling to ego-constructs, feel isolated, and fear impermanence. In Buddhist terms, it may be the root of dukkha — the suffering that comes from attachment, craving, and aversion.

 From the perspective of Iain McGilchrist’s hemisphere hypothesis, the DMN’s narrative-building functions are strongly aligned with left hemisphere modes of processing — analytic, sequential, and inclined to grasp and control. While these capacities are invaluable, McGilchrist warns that in modern culture the left hemisphere’s worldview has come to dominate, often at the expense of the right hemisphere’s more holistic, integrative, and embodied awareness. If the DMN amplifies this imbalance, the self it constructs risks becoming inflated, cut off from context, and deaf to the unifying, relational wisdom that the right hemisphere offers.

 Philosophers and sages in the early flowering of reflective thought recognized — even without our modern neuroscience — that certain ways of thinking lead to suffering and alienation, and others to peace and connection. The Buddha prescribed training the mind to free it from the traps of craving and aversion. The Stoics sought to cultivate equanimity and moral clarity by disciplining destructive passions. Lao Tzu urged a return to harmony with the Tao — a way of being attuned to the larger flow of nature. These can be read as the work of early psychoanalysts of the human condition: probing the architecture of thought, diagnosing its distortions, and prescribing remedies to realign the mind with a more balanced reality.

Recent neuroscience affirms much of this ancient wisdom. Mindfulness meditation has been shown to deactivate the DMN and strengthen networks associated with focused attention and sensory presence. Psychedelics, such as psilocybin, disrupt DMN integrity, often leading to a temporary dissolution of the ego and profound experiences of interconnectedness. These practices and interventions suggest ways of rebalancing a brain that, in modern life, is often overpowered by its own storytelling machinery.

The DMN represents a remarkable evolutionary step — the dawning of a mind that could imagine, regret, hope, and reflect. But the challenge of the 21st-century mind is to amplify the gifts and diminish the harms: to strengthen the integration between the hemispheres, so that the self constructed by the DMN takes its rightful place in unity with the whole of nature. This means cultivating the clarity of attention, the vitality of embodiment, and the connective wisdom of culture, so that our self-awareness serves life rather than narrowing it.

 We cannot abolish the DMN — nor would we want to. But we can, as individuals and societies, evolve in how we relate to it. In doing so, we continue the unfinished project that began in ancient meditation halls, philosophical schools, and oral traditions: the taming of the self-aware brain, so that it becomes not a source of alienation, but a bridge to deeper belonging.

Summation

Our accidental mind, the most intricate organ we know, is both a marvel and a challenge. It grants us astonishing powers of creativity and invention, yet it often stumbles when trying to govern its own impulses or foresee the consequences of its actions. By recognizing this double-edged nature, we gain the chance to steer our mental capacities wisely—harnessing the rehearsal functions of the pre-motor cortex to anticipate outcomes, and tempering the ego-driven reveries of the default mode network. In doing so, we strengthen our ability to act with foresight and compassion, ensuring that our extraordinary minds serve virtuous ends rather than destructive ones.

All right. Thanks for listening. 

Welcoming Wisdom: How Mature Minds Can Craft a Wiser, Kinder Future is now available as an eBook. You can find a link in the episode description on the Flourish As You Age podcast website.

Be well, Flourish, and use the power of your mature mind to make the world a better place for everyone.