The sought-after equanimity of “living in the moment” may be impossible, according to neuroscientists who’ve pinpointed a brain area responsible for using past decisions and outcomes to guide future behavior.

“The brain has to keep track of decisions and the outcomes they produce,” said Marc Sommer, who did his research for the study as a University of Pittsburgh neuroscience faculty member and is now on the faculty at Duke University. “You need that continuity of thought,” Sommer continued. “We are constantly keeping decisions in mind as we move through life, thinking about other things. We guessed it was analogous to working memory, which would point toward the prefrontal cortex.”

Sommer noted that defining such concepts related to metacognition, like consciousness, has been difficult for decades. He sees his research and future work related to studying metacognition as one step in a systematic process of working toward a better understanding of consciousness. By studying metacognition, he says, he reduces the big problem of studying a “train of thought” into a simpler component: examining how one cognitive process influences another.

“Why aren’t our thoughts independent of each other? Why don’t we just live in the moment? For a healthy person, it’s impossible to live in the moment. It’s a nice thing to say in terms of seizing the day and enjoying life, but our inner lives and experiences are much richer than that.”

Perhaps it’s a matter of being able to push the active decision-making and thinking processes further into the subconscious?  I find that when I achieve “flow” (e.g. while programming, reading, writing, listening to music, gardening), I can be so focussed on what I’m doing that I can take my mind of the more mundane decisions and negative thoughts that keep nagging at me.