Why You Can’t Think Anymore—and How to Fix It
Scientists discovered our brain’s most powerful mode. Then we designed our world to destroy it.
Nearly 25 years ago, Marcus Raichle made a groundbreaking discovery: when the brain isn’t responding to external stimuli, it doesn’t go quiet—it lights up. This pattern of activity is called the Default Mode Network, or DMN, and it may be the key to what makes us human.
When your brain gets quiet, it does four essential things:
Reflects on yourself
Considers others
Revisits the past
Imagines the future
This isn’t idleness. It’s the path to critical synthesis—our most uniquely human cognitive function. It’s in this time that we spark creativity and insight.
But we’re systematically eliminating our access to this mental space. And we don’t even realize it’s happening.
The Neuroscience of Insight
When your mind wanders—during a walk, a shower, a wait at the DMV—it isn’t wasting time. It’s working. It’s sifting, connecting, integrating. Your brain takes in everything: fragments of overheard conversations, a movie from last week, a passage from a book, the way someone looked at you in a meeting—and begins assembling them into new patterns.
Most of this material is buried in your subcortex, inaccessible on demand. But a dusty corner of your brain remembers. And when we create space—true mental space—that material re-emerges in surprising and generative ways.
Our best ideas don’t arrive when we’re thinking—they arrive when we stop.
This process begins to take shape in childhood. The Default Mode Network starts maturing around age 9—ironically, right around the time we begin telling kids to stop daydreaming and "pay attention."
We’ve spent decades trying to discipline away the very state that makes original thinking possible.
The Systematic Elimination of Boredom
To reach critical synthesis, you have to cross what I call the marsh of boredom—that itchy, restless space between external stimulation and internal insight.
We used to walk through this marsh all the time. Long car rides. Waiting rooms. Standing in line. We’d get bored, yes—but eventually, the mind would drift into something richer. Reflection. Connection. Imagination. Insight.
Now? Every moment of discomfort has a digital escape hatch.
We didn’t kill boredom with screens. We outsourced it—then monetized the transaction.
Until recently, I would take my phone into the shower just to squeeze in another podcast. I’d check my emails at red lights. When I would go to the bathroom, I’d make sure my phone came with me.
This isn’t some personal failing. It’s the predictable effect of carrying a device engineered to hijack boredom. Our phones are Oxycontin for attention—instant relief from the discomfort of silence, available 24/7.
What We’re Really Losing
Last year, I watched this dynamic play out with a family I’ve known for years who had retreated from bustling city life to their home in Maine. They were proudly anti-screen, but they’d simply replaced screen-based distraction with analog distraction, missing the actual core issue— the kids never had a moment to develop their DMN.
The mom had packed multiple plastic totes—books, puzzles, crafts, activities. When their 8-year-old muttered “I’m bored,” she reached for the next item. Every moment was accounted for.
Here we were in a place of natural beauty and mental stillness—and their child was robbed of her ability to experience it.
We’ve come to see boredom as a problem to be solved rather than a threshold to be crossed.
The Role of Music
As I explored my own habits, I wondered: does music interfere with the DMN too?
Surprisingly, no. A 2014 study found that listening to any music we enjoy—whether Beethoven or Eminem—increases functional brain connectivity and supports DMN activity.
This reinforces a deeper point: the issue isn’t stimulation. It’s stimulation designed to seize and hold our attention.
Music can accompany daydreaming. Social media, podcasts, audio books, and games all interrupt it.
The Business Model Behind the War on Boredom
There’s a reason Big Tech employs behavioral scientists. They’ve realized our discomfort with silence is a gold mine.
Every scroll instead of a thought is monetizable. Every podcast filling a quiet walk is data and surface area for ads. Every bathroom check-in, every elevator glance, every reflexive swipe—we've trained ourselves to avoid the marsh, and someone else is profiting from that avoidance.
This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s just good business.
And it’s quietly dismantling our ability to think in the deep, nonlinear way that makes us most human.
When Mental Wilderness Actually Works
This past summer, I spent nine days walking 106 miles across Scotland—through fields, over mountains, and mostly through relentless rain. No podcasts. No audiobooks. Just the midges, waterfalls, and endless miles of old military roads. Quite literally the Marsh of Boredom.
It was during those long stretches of discomfort that my brain finally had space to synthesize everything I'd been absorbing about technology's impact on children. Swatting insects and trudging through mud, the scattered pieces began to assemble: I needed to create an operating system designed for my kids, not for data extraction. I needed to understand everything about attention, about how the brain actually works, about why our incentives are completely misaligned with Big Tech's.
None of these insights came during focused "thinking time." They emerged from the exact mental state our devices are designed to eliminate—sustained boredom that eventually gives way to breakthrough clarity.
This is your Default Mode Network doing what it evolved to do: taking disparate information and reorganizing it into actionable understanding.
Protecting Your Mental Wilderness
The DMN doesn’t thrive in hustle, optimization, or perpetual input. It needs mental wilderness—cognitive space that’s unstructured, unclaimed, and left alone.
We protect physical wilderness from development. We need to start doing the same with mental wilderness—especially for our children.
For parents, you must actively defend four specific types of time:
Transition moments. Car rides without podcasts or tablets. Walking between activities. The space between getting home and starting homework. These moments of mental shifting are where insights often surface.
Waiting periods. Doctor's offices, checkout lines, school pickup, waiting in restaurants—resist the urge to fill every pause with entertainment. Let your child experience the journey from restlessness to mental wandering.
Physical discomfort. Long walks, challenging hikes, even boring chores create the exact conditions where the DMN activates. The mild stress of physical effort paired with mental freedom is neurologically optimal for insight generation.
Bedtime boundaries. The hour before sleep, when the brain naturally begins to process the day's information, needs protection from both screens and structured activities.
The hardest part isn't managing your children's boredom—it's managing your own discomfort with their boredom. When your child complains there's "nothing to do," that's not a problem to solve. It's a threshold to cross.
That means letting silence be silent. Letting pauses go unfilled. Letting boredom run its course.
Because the marsh of boredom isn’t an obstacle—it’s the path to every good idea you’ve ever had.
Your thoughts can’t synthesize if they’re never allowed to settle.
Stop interrupting them.
So many gems in this, Sam!