CBD 2026: The Narrating Brain: The Default Mode Network, the Self, and Consciousness in the Age of AI with Vinod Menon, PhD

Even in our quietest moments, the brain is never truly at rest. A set of interconnected regions known as the default mode network (DMN) continuously weaves memory, language, and meaning into the inner narrative from which our sense of self, our agency, and our conscious experience emerge. Drawing on two decades of neuroscience, including work from my laboratory that helped characterize the DMN and its role in self-reference, autobiographical memory, and social cognition, I explore how the brain constructs and sustains the ongoing story of the "self" I will then turn to a pressing question of our moment: what becomes of this narrating, meaning-making self as we increasingly offload attention, reflection, and even reasoning to generative AI? I will consider both the strains that pervasive AI use may place on the DMN and the capacities for discernment and agency it supports, and the promising possibility that contemplative practices offer a means of protecting and strengthening these very functions. My aim is to leave the audience with a scientifically grounded, and hopeful, framework for cultivating a resilient inner life in an age of intelligent machines.

Vinod Menon, PhD, is the Rachael L. and Walter F. Nichols, MD, Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and Professor, by courtesy, of Neurology and Neurological Sciences at the Stanford University School of Medicine, where he directs the Stanford Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience Laboratory. His research combines advanced brain imaging with computational methods to investigate the architecture, function, and development of large-scale human brain networks; he and his team were among the first to characterize the default mode, salience, and frontoparietal networks that underlie attention, emotion, memory, and self-referential thought. This work has yielded a widely adopted framework for understanding both healthy cognition and its disruption across psychiatric and neurological disorders. His 2023 Neuron review, "20 years of the default mode network: A review and synthesis," proposes that the DMN generates the coherent internal narrative central to our sense of self and consciousness. A Highly Cited Researcher whose work has been cited more than 100,000 times, Dr. Menon received his undergraduate degree in physics from the Indian Institute of Technology and PhD in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin, and has been on the Stanford faculty since 2000.

This session is part of the FREE Contemplation by Design Summit, Oct. 14-25, 2026.

The full summit schedule is posted at: https://med.stanford.edu/contemplation/summit.html.