So for listeners that are maybe unfamiliar, what's actually going on in the brain? Like what if I was to be looking at a scan of the brain or the chemistry of the brain, what is actually happening when that default mode network is going on? Yeah.

So a couple of things.

The first thing that happens is that blood flow increases to a huge extent to the default network and also to the frontal lobe, which is the seat of your higher faculties.

So whenever you think of things like human attention and decision making, our personalities, many of our higher faculties are found as a result of activity in the frontal lobe.

And a lot of the default network is actually found in the frontal lobe, even though it actually spans out across the brain.

So the first thing that happens is that blood flow increases and that delivers more oxygen to your nerve cells.

And as a result, they basically become a lot more active.

What have you found has been, maybe in your own life, in your own creative work that you do as a researcher and a writer, what do you find really works for you that allows that brain to really go to rest?

Here's Joseph to share some surprising ideas from his new book, The Brain at Rest: How the Art and Science of Doing Nothing Can Improve Your Life.

Hi, I'm Dr. Joseph Jabelli.

I'm a neuroscientist and writer, and I want to talk to you about the neuroscience of rest and the most important part of your brain that you've probably never heard of.

And to do that, I'm going to share with you five of the key insights from my book, The Brain at Rest.

Overwork is literally killing us.

This is something we really need to talk about.

I spoke to many people from different lines of work, and while each had their own story, together they pointed to something bigger, a global pandemic quietly being ignored by governments everywhere, which I call the work pandemic.