Neuroscience of White Intuition

Let's translate the materials of the article below into a more understandable language. There is a neural network in the brain, also called "default mode network" (DMN). It operates when the brain seems not to be engaged in any specific tasks. Its background activity involves random wandering of the mind through images and fantasies. The default mode network is activated during the brain’s resting state and is associated with daydreaming, planning, and imagining the future. The structural basis of this network includes the hippocampus, the posterior cingulate gyrus, several areas of the temporal and posterior parietal cortex, and several frontal areas of the dorsal and ventral prefrontal cortex. Electrical impulses travel through all these areas during its operation. This same network is also involved during dreaming. In fact, it is responsible for Ni, i.e. for any scenario fantasies that mobilize episodic memory (memory of dynamically developing episodes of the past), but this same mechanism is also used when we imagine some fictional images of the future or simply fantastical situations.

The study cited below found that the frontal dorsal and ventral cortex participate differently in organizing this white-intuitive imagination. The ventral cortex ensures the vividness of the fantasy, while the dorsal cortex is involved in the emotional evaluation of the fantasized situation.

For example, in dreams, this should look like this: when you experience a vivid dream in which you act as a neutral observer from the outside, the ventral cortex is active. But as soon as the dream involves you personally in an action that is not indifferent to you (for example, when it turns into a nightmare), the dorsal cortex immediately becomes active. The same is true for daytime white-intuitive imagination.

"Neurologists have discovered what lies behind imagination"

"Two components of imagination — constructing and evaluating imagined scenarios — rely on separate subnetworks in the default mode network, according to research recently published in JNeurosci.

Even when you aren’t doing anything, your brain is hard at work. The default mode network (DMN) activates during the brain’s resting state and has been linked to daydreaming, planning, and imagining the future. In previous studies, scientists noticed the DMN could be divided into two subnetworks, ventral and dorsal, but their different roles were debated.

In the latest study, researchers used fMRI to measure brain activity in volunteers when they were instructed to imagine specific scenarios (e.g., "Imagine you won the lottery"). The imagined scenarios varied in brightness and significance—some were positive, others negative.

It turned out that only the brightness of the scenario affected the activity of the ventral DMN subsystem. In contrast, only the significance (positive or negative scenario) affected the activity of the dorsal subsystem. Thus, the DMN network was divided into separate subsystems for constructing and evaluating imagined scenarios."

https://scitechdaily.com/the-brain-networks-underlying-imagination-separate-subnetworks-construct-and-evaluate-imagined-scenarios/

Scientific reference: "The Ventral and Dorsal Default Mode Networks Are Dissociably Modulated by the Vividness and Valence of Imagined Events" by Sangil Lee, Trishala Parthasarathi, and Joseph W. Cable, May 17, 2021, Journal of Neuroscience.

Earlier studies have shown that at the level of neurotransmitters, the "default network" is regulated by a complex combination of influences from dopamine, GABA, and serotonin: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1117104109