The Demon In Your Brain

Neuroscience has caught up to theology

In 1942, author C.S. Lewis (best-known for penning The Chronicles of Narnia) published an odd little book consisting entirely of correspondence from a senior demon named Screwtape to a junior one, Wormwood.

In The Screwtape Letters, we learn that Wormwood is new to his job, which is to corrupt an ordinary Englishman living in the modern era. This is challenging, because Wormwood’s powers in the material world are limited to subtle persuasion. He can not interact physically; he can only influence his client’s subconscious mind.

This concept is not unique to Lewis, of course. The idea of guardian angels dates back to Biblical times, and in some folklore traditions, these benevolent entities do have malevolent counterparts. More formally, the 18th century theologian Emanuel Swedenborg taught that each of us has “associate spirits” trying to influence us either for good or evil – a doctrine that foreshadowed (and perhaps influenced) Lewis’s work, as well as the pop culture trope of the shoulder angel/demon.

Nonetheless, Lewis raises some intriguing points. One of these is that the opposite of good is not necessarily evil; it can simply be nothing. In Screwtape’s words, “Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why.”

It is this concept that bridges the gap between theology and neuroscience. The demon in our brain is now referred to as the DMN – short for Default Mode Network. Unlike Screwtape and Wormwood, it isn’t inherently bad – the DMN is important for creativity, self-reflection, and planning. But it also plays a vital role in anxiety, depression, and addiction, because the DMN is the autopilot that controls us when we’re not paying attention to what we’re doing.

“Idle hands are the devil’s playthings,” as the saying goes, and the same is true for an idle mind. When the DMN is pulling our strings, we sleepwalk through life, automatically following routines we have unintentionally learned: worrying about the future, ruminating on the past, overeating or distracting ourselves to try to feel better – spinning our gears endlessly in Lewis’s “dreary flickering of the mind.”

How much of the time are we in this state of being? According to research by Harvard psychologists Killingsworth and Gilbert, we spend 46.9% of our waking hours on autopilot. Screwtape would be pleased, because that is certainly a lot of life wasted on nothing.

A modern interpretation of this can be found in the Adam Sandler movie Click, in which the main character discovers a remote control that allows him to fast forward through tedious parts of his life. Unfortunately, the remote control, which can be thought of as his DMN, starts engaging automatically. The hapless protagonist soon discovers that he’s missing out on all the experiences that make life worthwhile.

Although Click is a comedy, the humor is built around a sad truth. Between the time we spend lost in our thoughts, distracted by our phones, and mindlessly consuming diversions of various kinds, we miss out on a lot. As Screwtape gleefully notes, “It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.”

Dispelling the DMN

The alternative to living life on autopilot is mindfulness – that is, consciously choosing to be aware of our experience from moment to moment. But, contrary to popular belief, “mindfulness” doesn’t mean sitting in the lotus position and focusing on your breathing for an hour a day. According to Dr. Judson Brewer, formal meditation can be useful for reducing the amount of time we spend on autopilot, but it’s actually less effective than informal practice - what he refers to as “small moments, often.”

These small moments can be as simple as mentally noting what is predominant in your experience in any given moment. Is it seeing, hearing, feeling, or tasting? Just becoming aware of what you are actually experiencing – what researchers refer to as grounding – helps to switch off the DMN. The more often you do this, the less quickly the autopilot turns back on, and the less opportunity the devil on your shoulder has to whisper in your ear without you noticing it.

Spoiler alert: in Click, the guy who fast-forwarded through life gets a second chance. In The Screwtape Letters, Wormwood’s Englishman veers off the path to damnation. And we, too, have the ability to change our ways.

Call it a demon, call it an associate spirit, or think of it as the DMN. The first step in reducing the amount of your life that it steals is becoming aware of it. The next step is to reduce its power by consciously paying attention to what you’re doing and experiencing. Beyond that, the choice of what to do and how to live truly becomes your own.