Chanakya Knew the Idle Mind Had Work to Do
Chanakya wrote in the Arthashastra that a minister who never rests will exhaust his judgment before he exhausts his enemies. The principle was about statecraft, but the neuroscience behind it took another 2,300 years to arrive. In 2001, neurologist Marcus Raichle at Washington University identified what he called the default mode network, a set of brain regions that switch on precisely when you stop concentrating on a task. The discovery overturned a basic assumption: the brain is not idling when you daydream. It is running a different program.
