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The brain's dark energy.

Just as there is dark energy in the universe, there is dark energy in our brain. It has been suggested that "visible" elements of neuronal activity, or currently measurable neuronal responses to environmental stimuli may only account for 5% of the total energy the brain consumes.

The rest can be referred to as intrinsic brain activity or dark energy. Of great interest is its possible relationship to creativity and intelligence.

Brain imaging results suggest that the brain works harder when it is daydreaming than when it performs a specific task, but we don’t exactly know why. This is interesting if we agree that the wandering mind is fertile ground for creative or breakthrough ideas and concepts.

Specific activities such as gardening, taking a shower, cutting the grass etc, may bring an idea to consciousness, but if we are doing too many activities there may be no excess or spare energy available for the brain to use in the act of creativity. This may be why multi-tasking, external pressure, stress, etc., inhibits creativity.

Using brain imaging techniques to look at brain connectivity when the brain is not performing any task should lead to a better understanding of the brain’s dark energy and help us characterize pathological conditions. If we let the subject’s brain wander and we perform fMRI and we do statistical analysis using Independent Component Analysis and Seed Based Correlations, we will be able to show a functional network map which should be characteristic of a specific brain condition.

Adolfo Cotter

For more information you can click here:

Zhang D, et al., Disease and the brain’s dark energy, Nature Reviews Neurology, 2010, 6 15-28

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