Living in the Moment, According to the Brain
Salience network meditation is really just a more precise name for what this whole gear is training, and it’s worth saying plainly before going further.
🔬 The science
Many contemplative traditions have taught, for millennia, that living in the moment increases happiness. In 2011, Judson Brewer and colleagues at Yale opened their paper with almost that exact line — then went looking for the neural signature of it. In experienced meditators, across concentration, lovingkindness, and choiceless-awareness practice alike, the core hubs of the mind-wandering network — medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate cortices — went quiet. Not just during meditation. At rest, too. The trait had outlasted the state.
That last detail is the one worth sitting with. Brewer’s team wasn’t just measuring what happened while people meditated — they measured what happened afterward, in ordinary resting baseline, with no instruction to do anything in particular. The quieting persisted. Whatever practice builds, it doesn’t switch off the moment you get up off the cushion.
Meet the Third Network: Salience
🔬 The science
In 2007, William Seeley and colleagues identified a network anchored in the anterior insula and the dorsal anterior cingulate, with deep wiring into the body’s limbic and subcortical systems. They called it the salience network. Its job isn’t thinking or resting — its job is deciding what deserves your attention right now, before there is a thought to follow or a moment to rest in.
This was a genuinely new addition to the map. Before Seeley’s paper, most brain research organized itself around two poles — networks for focused task engagement, and the resting, self-referential network that takes over when nothing external demands attention. The salience network sits underneath both, deciding which one gets called up in the first place. It’s not thinking about the world and it’s not daydreaming about yourself. It’s the fast, largely unconscious triage system deciding what counts as urgent enough to interrupt whatever you were doing.
The Switchboard, Not the Rooms
Think of the default-mode network — the mind-wandering network — as one room, and the executive-control network, which handles focused, goal-directed tasks, as another. The salience network isn’t a third room. It’s the hand on the light switch, deciding which room gets the power. Gear One trains your ability to walk back into the room you want. Gear Two is about retraining the hand on the switch itself.
The executive-control network is worth naming properly rather than leaving as a vague label. It’s the circuitry — anchored largely in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and posterior parietal cortex — responsible for working memory, planning, and inhibiting the response you’d default to in favor of the one the task actually requires. It’s what’s active when you’re holding a phone number in mind, resisting a distraction, or deliberately working through a problem step by step. It’s a genuinely different mode of operating than either the wandering mind or the resting mind, and the salience network is what decides, moment to moment, whether this room or one of the other two gets the current.
Menon and Uddin’s triple network model, building directly on Seeley’s discovery, is the framework that gave this switchboard picture its name. Their proposal wasn’t just that these three networks exist — it was that most of what looks like a psychiatric or attentional problem, from anxiety to depression to ADHD, can be described as some kind of miscalibration in how the salience network is doing its switching. Too quick to flag threat, and the switch keeps flipping to threat-response mode.
Too slow to disengage from self-referential thought, and the switch stays stuck on the wandering-mind room. The switch itself, not either room alone, is where a great deal of the actual trouble — and a great deal of the actual leverage — turns out to live. Good news is that we can train this with salience network meditation.
You don’t need a lab to notice the switch in action. A phone buzzes on the table during a focused conversation, and before any decision gets made about whether to look, something has already flagged the buzz as worth interrupting for. That flag is the salience network doing its job at a speed faster than deliberate choice. Laktong doesn’t stop the phone from buzzing, and it doesn’t silence the flag. It changes what happens in the half-second after the flag goes up — whether the hand reaches for the phone automatically, or whether there’s enough space to notice the pull and choose.
Sharpen vs. Loosen: How FA and OM Diverge
🔬 The science
A 2022 study in Scientific Reports found focused-attention practice increased activity in salience-network-linked control regions while decreasing inter-network communication — the hand grips the switch more decisively. Open-monitoring practice did closer to the opposite: it quieted the mind-wandering network further and increased communication between all three networks — the hand loosens, and the switchboard becomes more integrated.
This is genuinely useful, practical information, not just an interesting distinction. It means Shiné and Laktong aren’t two flavors of the same relaxation — they’re two different exercises for two different parts of the same system, the way a strength day and a mobility day both train the same joint but ask something different of it. Open monitoring meditation or Laktong meditation, specifically, appears to be the one doing the integration work — loosening the grip of any single network so the whole switchboard talks to itself more freely, which maps directly onto what practitioners describe subjectively as spaciousness.
Laktong Meditation and Non-Reactive Awareness
Laktong meditation — Tibetan for clear seeing, Sanskrit Vipassana — asks something different of you than Shiné does. Not “come back to the anchor,” but “notice what arises, and let it pass without chasing or pushing.” This is open monitoring in its purest form: the salience network still flags what’s happening, but you stop being dragged wherever it points. The noticing and the reacting come apart. That gap is where freedom actually lives. Whatever arises there is nothing other than the playful richness of mind itself. The two are always taught together — see Shine and Laktong Meditation here.
TIER 2 — MY FRAMING
I can’t resist noticing a loose parallel to superposition here — a system holding many possible states at once, before anything collapses into a single outcome. In that gap, before reactivity picks one path and runs with it, the mind is arguably doing something structurally similar. I want to be careful with this one: it’s a poetic resonance, not a claim that quantum mechanics is happening in your skull — the same spirit as C=E=mc², borrowed language pointing at something real, not literal physics doing psychological work, but maybe?
Does the Mind Make Its Own Molecule?
🔬 The science
A 2002 PET imaging study (Kjaer et al.) found meditation produced a measured 65% increase in endogenous dopamine release in the ventral striatum — directly observed, correlated with reduced desire for action and heightened sensory awareness. The popular “meditation is your own natural opioids” claim is shakier: a well-controlled study blocked opioid receptors with naloxone during meditation and found pain relief held up anyway, evidence that meditation’s effects likely run through more than one channel.
The ventral striatum is best known as the brain’s reward hub — the region that lights up for food, for social connection, for anything the brain has learned to treat as worth pursuing. A 65% jump in dopamine release there, from sitting still and doing nothing external, is a genuinely large effect by the standards of neuroimaging research. It also reframes what’s happening in a practice like Laktong meditation: the stillness isn’t the absence of reward chemistry; it’s a different, self-generated source of it.
Same Direction, Different Driver
Regular readers of Technologies of Ecstasy will recognize this territory. The REBUS model (Carhart-Harris and Friston, 2019) — Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics — describes psychedelics loosening this same triple-network architecture pharmacologically, relaxing the brain’s most confident top-down predictions. What you’re reading here is the same destination reached by a different road: no chemistry, just years of sitting, retraining the same switch by hand instead of dissolving it by force. Same direction. Different driver.
It’s worth naming a second non-chemical road here too: Stanislav Grof’s holotropic breathwork, developed in the 1970s specifically as a legal, accessible way to reach non-ordinary states of consciousness after LSD research was shut down. Buddhist breath practice got there first, by a couple of millennia, and by a different route again — the family resemblance between these breath-based systems, all built in the absence of a substance, deserves its own future post rather than a rushed mention here.
The Switch Under Commercial Pressure
TIER 2 — MY FRAMING
I’ll name something the neuroscience doesn’t measure directly but that follows naturally from it: an entire commercial industry has been built around learning to trigger the salience network faster and more reliably than anything else in a person’s environment can. The notification badge, the autoplay countdown, the infinite scroll — these are engineered flags, competing directly for the same switch this post is describing, and they are considerably better funded than any individual’s meditation practice. Laktong isn’t just a personal wellness exercise in that light. It’s a countermeasure to a switch that a great many well-resourced systems have a direct financial interest in flipping as often as possible.
Why the Switch Matters Clinically, Not Just Philosophically
TIER 2 — MY FRAMING
This isn’t only an interesting model — it’s become one of the more clinically useful frameworks in contemplative neuroscience precisely because it locates the problem somewhere treatable. Telling someone with anxiety to simply think different thoughts asks them to out-argue a network that isn’t fundamentally about content in the first place; it’s about triage speed. Retraining the salience network directly, through the kind of graduated, repeated practice Laktong asks for, targets the actual switching mechanism rather than any particular thought running through it. That’s a meaningfully different intervention than positive thinking, and it’s why mindfulness-based approaches have found real traction in clinical settings that talk therapy alone sometimes struggles to reach.
V̂ and the Switch, Named Plainly
It’s worth naming the connection to the site’s own valence equation once here too, the way Post One did, but more loosely this time. If V̂ is the hand or mind shaping what gets amplified in any given moment, the salience network — the very thing salience network meditation trains — isn’t the hand itself. It’s closer to what decides which hand gets to reach for the switch at all. Laktong meditation doesn’t grab the switch and hold it in a fixed position. It loosens the grip enough that V̂ has room to choose, rather than defaulting to whatever flagged loudest a half-second earlier.
This is really just the triple network model again, said in the site’s own language instead of the clinical one. Open monitoring meditation is the practice; the switching itself, between the wandering mind and focused engagement, is what the REBUS model describes psychedelics loosening by a different route entirely. Same switch, however you name it — clinically, poetically, or pharmacologically, but here just in the meditation.
A Practical Distinction Worth Keeping
If Gear One and Gear Two ever blur together in practice, this is the distinction to hold onto: Shiné asks where is my attention right now, and gently returns it. Laktong asks what just grabbed my attention, and lets the noticing itself be the whole of the response, without needing to return anywhere in particular. Most teachers present them as sequential — steady the attention first, then open it — and the neuroscience gives a reason beyond tradition for that ordering. A salience network that hasn’t been trained to grip decisively in the first place has little to loosen later. Gear Two isn’t available as a shortcut around Gear One; it’s built on top of it.
None of this requires you to take the quantum language on faith, either. Strip out every metaphor in this post and the neuroscience alone still tells a complete, self-contained story: three networks, one switch, and two different, well-documented ways of training that switch. The superposition language and the REBUS cross-reference are additions for readers who want them, not load-bearing parts of the claim. I’d rather you walk away with the plain version solidly understood than the poetic version half-remembered.
There’s a reason this territory overlaps so heavily with what performance psychologists call flow. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s decades of research into flow states describe exactly this signature — full absorption in a task, quieted self-referential chatter, a felt sense of the activity happening almost by itself. Flow researchers arrived at this picture largely independent of Buddhist contemplative theory, studying rock climbers, surgeons, and chess players rather than monks, and landed on strikingly similar territory. Two very different research traditions, decades apart, converging on the same triple-network story from opposite directions is not nothing.
It’s worth naming plainly what Gear Two adds to Gear One that isn’t just more of the same practice. Attention training alone can, in principle, be pointed at almost anything — a mind can become extremely good at holding focus on a task and still be entirely at the mercy of whatever the salience network flags as urgent in between tasks. Awareness training is what makes the switch itself visible, which is the precondition for eventually choosing, rather than simply reacting to, what gets the current next.
Bridge to Gear Three
None of this tells you what to do with the freedom once you have it — once the mind stops being dragged wherever the switch points. That’s not an attention problem or an awareness problem anymore. That’s a question of where you deliberately choose to aim, once you finally have the choice.
QP
📚 FURTHER READING:
Inbound:
THE HAPPINESS PRESCRIPTION — POST 1 — GEAR ONE: ATTENTION→
THE HAPPINESS PRESCRIPTION — POST 2 — GEAR TWO: AWARENESS — You are already here 🙂
THE HAPPINESS PRESCRIPTION — POST 3 — GEAR THREE: HEART→
THE HAPPINESS PRESCRIPTION — PILLAR POST — HAPPY MIND, HAPPY LIFE?→
What Your Quantum Attention Is Making Real Right Now ⟨v(t)⟩ = ⟨ψ(t)| V̂ |ψ(t)⟩ →
Calm Abiding & Clear Seeing in Tibetan Buddhist Meditation →
Outbound:
• Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Flow Psychology →
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