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Dan Harris: Hack Your Brain’s Default Mode with Meditation | Big Think

Big Think | December 12, 2025



Hack Your Brain’s Default Mode with Meditation
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Dan Harris was named co-anchor of ABC News’ weekend edition of “Good Morning America” in October 2010. He is also a correspondent for ABC News’ broadcasts and platforms including “World News with Diane Sawyer,” “Good Morning America,” “Nightline,” ABC News Digital and ABC News Radio, and for four years anchored “World News Sunday.”

Harris joined ABC News in March 2000 and has covered many of the biggest stories in recent years. He has reported on the mass shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, Aurora, Colorado and Tucson, Arizona, and has covered natural disasters from Haiti to Myanmar to New Orleans. He has also reported on combat in Afghanistan, Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, and has made six visits to Iraq.
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TRANSCRIPT:

There’s no way a fidgety and skeptical news anchor would ever have started meditating were it not for the science. The science is really compelling. It shows that meditation can boost your immune system, lower your blood pressure, help you deal with problems ranging from irritable bowel syndrome to psoriasis. And the neuroscience is where it really gets sci-fi. There was a study out of Harvard that shows that short daily doses of meditation can literally grow the gray matter in key areas of your brain having to do with self-awareness and compassion and shrink the gray matter in the area associated with stress.

There was also a study out of Yale that looked at what’s called the default mode network of the brain. It’s a connected series of brain regions that are active during most of our waking hours when we’re doing that thing that human beings do all the time which is obsessing about ourselves, thinking about the past, thinking about the future, doing anything but being focused on what’s happening right now. Meditators not only turn off the default mode network of their brain while they’re meditating but even when they’re not meditating. In other words, meditators are setting a new default mode. And what’s that default mode? They’re focused on what’s happening right now.

In sports this is called being in the zone. It’s nothing mystical. It’s not magical. You’re not floating off into cosmic ooze. You are just being where you are – big cliché in self-help circles is being in the now. You can use that term if you want but because it’s accurate. It’s slightly annoying but it’s accurate. It’s more just being focused on what you’re doing. And the benefits of that are enormous. And this is why you’re seeing these unlikely meditators now, why you’re seeing the U.S. Marines adopting it, the U.S. Army, corporate executives from the head of Ford to the founders of Twitter. Athletes from Phil Jackson to many, many Olympians. Scientists, doctors, lawyers, school children. There’s this sort of elite subculture of high achievers who are adopting this because they know it can help you be more focused on what you’re doing and it can stop you from being yanked around by the voice in your head.

My powers of prognostication are not great. I bought a lot of stock in a company that made Palm Pilot back in 2000 and that didn’t go so well for me. But having said that I’m going to make a prediction. I think we’re looking at meditation as the next big public health revolution. In the 1940s if you told people that you went running they would say, who’s chasing you. Right now if you tell people you meditate – and I have a lot of experience with telling people this, they’re going to look at you like you’re a little weird most of the time. That’s going to change. Meditation is going to join the pantheon of no brainers like exercise, brushing your teeth and taking the meds that your doctor prescribes to you. These are all things that if you don’t do you feel guilty about. And that is where I think we’re heading with meditation because the science is so strongly suggestive that meditation can do really, really great things for your brain and for your body.

Read the full transcript https://bigthink.com/videos/dan-harris-hack-your-brains-default-mode-with-meditation/

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Comments

This post currently has 28 comments.

  2. @Starfish0.

    December 12, 2025 at 4:43 pm

    Perfectly said, a decade since this video and most people still have no idea of how powerful and healing meditation is, this is the kind of information that must be the foundation of education.

  3. @RoumdoulBoran

    December 12, 2025 at 4:43 pm

    This is an old video so maybe the research was different but Mr.Harris is describing the default mode network system inaccurately. The DMN does not get turned off with meditation. The DMN is actually where you self reflect, daydream, imagine and build awareness. Our parasympathetic nervous system is what overrides the DMN. Through meditation we strengthen the DMN.

  13. @dodoraptor8387

    December 12, 2025 at 4:43 pm

    An average person needs to rely on external stimulus to bring him a desired emotional response, may be it be excitement, hapiness or serenity…i.e you need something external to alter your internal state…Meditation skips the reliance on external stimuli and alters your state directly from the inside.

  23. @scalefrog2

    December 12, 2025 at 4:43 pm

    I bought Palm PIlot stock too!! And my dad bought Apple . . . I feel your pain. But as a physician, I loved the Palm Pilot . . .and had a "strong gut feeling" everyone else would love it like I did . . . wrong . . .😀

  28. @That_Freedom_Guy

    December 12, 2025 at 4:43 pm

    Meditation can also give insights that take us away from greed and hate which will have a negative impact on the economy as it is set up today. Therefore, they will have to invent a "capital safe" kind of meditation and push that weakened version through the great reset , etc.

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