Don't think about that! (and what happens afterwards)

What happens when you tell your brain to not think about something? There's a part of the brain that gets more active. This part was examined in MRIs in a new Dartmouth study.

But it also has a side benefit of a more philosophical streak. When the Dartmouth scientists put their subjects in a scanner and told them not to think about an exam or a girlfriend, the images they took didn't show some homunculus crouching in a ventricle of the brain, issuing commands. ("You there--you thought! Disappear immediately!") Instead, they saw evidence of a network continually reconfiguring itself.

The brain -- an amazing thing that has defied understanding for so long -- always manages to get attached to an analogy or metaphor that represents the new New Thing. In earlier days, pulleys and levers. A hologram. A computer (plus, I'm sure, other things in between). And now here, a network. What will be the new New thing a decade or so hence? Our understanding of brain function will adapt and adopt accordingly.