The Loudest Quiet

The room was called the Calm Corner on the door sign, which Maya thought was the most inaccurate label in the building. She was not calm. She was the opposite of calm. She had finished the math test in eleven minutes, handed it in, and been sent here because her leg-bouncing was disturbing the other students.

Soren was already inside, sitting against the far wall on a foam wedge, not doing anything.

Just sitting.

Maya had never seen anyone just sit before. Not without a phone, not without a book, not without at least pretending to look at something.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"Thinking," he said.

"About what?"

He considered this seriously. "I don't know yet."

Maya sat down across from him. The room had a projector on the ceiling that made slow blue shapes move across the floor like clouds. She watched one slide over her shoe.

"I got sent here for thinking too fast," she said. "What did you get sent here for?"

"Not thinking fast enough. I froze on the reading test. Just stopped." He pulled his knee up to his chest. "My brain went somewhere else and wouldn't come back."

"Where did it go?"

Soren opened his notebook to a blank page and looked at it. "I was supposed to be reading about the water cycle. And then I started thinking about whether clouds are one thing or many things. And then I was thinking about whether a crowd of people is one thing or many things. And then I was completely somewhere else and the proctor was saying my name."

Maya stared at him. "That happens to you too?"

"You freeze?"

"No. The other thing. The going-somewhere-else thing. When I'm supposed to be focused and my brain just, takes off." She waved her hand like something departing. "My mom says I have to work on it. My teacher says I have to work on it. My dad just sighs."

Soren wrote something in the notebook. "My therapist says the same. She calls it task avoidance. But it doesn't feel like avoiding. It feels like my brain is doing something. Just not the thing I'm supposed to be doing."

The blue shapes moved. One looked like a hand. Then like a fish. Then like nothing identifiable.

"My cousin told me something," Maya said slowly, "about brains. She's in university studying it. She said that when your brain looks like it's resting, it's actually more active than when it's focused. She showed me a scan." Maya held up both hands like she was describing a fire. "All this lit-up orange. She said researchers used to throw those scans out. They thought they were mistakes."

Soren looked up from the notebook.

"They were scanning people doing math tasks," Maya continued, "and they'd compare them to the resting scans to see what the math was doing. But the resting scans were so active they kept checking the equipment. They thought the machine was broken."

"But it wasn't."

"It wasn't." Maya pointed at her own head. "There's a whole system. My cousin called it something. The default mode network. It turns on when you're not focused on a task. It's doing something. Scientists think it's involved in imagining things, and thinking about yourself, and making connections between things that aren't obviously connected."

Soren wrote the words carefully: default mode network.

"And when you focus on something," Maya said, "it turns off. The focused attention system and the default mode system, they suppress each other. It's like they're trading off."

Soren sat very still. "So when I'm supposed to be reading about the water cycle and my brain goes somewhere else."

"The default mode is running."

"And the two systems can't both be fully on at the same time."

"That's what she said."

Soren looked at the blank notebook page. He had written nothing on it and he had still been doing something. He had been in the sensory room not-thinking and also entirely thinking, and his brain had been lit up orange the entire time, and no one had known it, and he had not known how to explain it, and there was a name for it, and it was not a flaw in the equipment.

"What does it do?" he asked. "The default mode. What's it actually for?"

"My cousin said they don't completely know yet. It's linked to creativity. And to imagining the future, like simulating what might happen. And to understanding other people, like imagining what someone else is thinking." Maya's voice dropped slightly. "She said it's overactive in depression. Like the self-referential part gets stuck in a loop."

Neither of them said anything for a moment.

"That's not simple," Soren finally said.

"No."

"It's not just daydreaming."

"No. It's something. We just don't know what yet."

Soren looked at the ceiling, at the blue shapes, at the slow cloud that was not a cloud. He thought about his brain running its private machinery while a proctor said his name. He thought about every teacher who had ever tapped his desk.

"Is it bad?" he asked. "For it to run a lot?"

"My cousin said they don't know that either. She said the researchers who study it think it might be important. That the switching, the going back and forth between focused and not-focused, is part of how creative work actually happens. Not the focused part alone. Both."

Maya stopped talking. The blue light made her face look like she was underwater.

"I want to ask her more questions," she said. "There's a lot they don't know yet."

"Yeah," Soren said.

He turned to a fresh page in the notebook. He wrote: what is the brain doing when it thinks it isn't doing anything. He underlined the word anything twice.

Then he put the pen down and looked at the ceiling and let his brain go wherever it needed to go.