When healthy people engage in a very focused activity, they, in a sense, lose themselves,” said senior investigator Marcus E. Raichle, M.D., whose research group in 2001 first identified the default mode network. “If you really are engaged in something, you kind of forget yourself, and that loss of self corresponds to the deactivation we observe in brain scans of the default network. But that doesn’t seem to happen in the brains of people with depression.
