Worcester is the setting for a laboratory visit that turns the book’s discussion of the default mode network into an observable experiment. At the Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts medical school, Judson Brewer’s lab uses neural feedback to let researchers and volunteers watch activity in the posterior cingulate cortex in real time. The visit connects a particular place and piece of equipment to the book’s broader inquiry into self-reference, attention, and mental suffering.

Setting and Research Context

The book identifies Worcester as the location of Brewer’s laboratory at the Center for Mindfulness. Brewer, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who studies the brains of meditators, invited the narrator to take part in experiments involving the narrator’s own default mode network. His lab’s neural-feedback tool focused on the posterior cingulate cortex, a centrally located node associated with self-referential mental processes.

The lab’s location matters because the scene brings together two strands of the book’s account of altered attention. Earlier, Brewer’s research had linked experienced meditators’ brains with the reduced default-mode-network activity observed in people given psilocybin. In Worcester, the investigation shifts from comparing groups to demonstrating a way of tracking one component of that network in a volunteer. The account presents the laboratory not as a general portrait of the city, but as a specific research setting where a proposed connection between mental activity and brain function becomes experimentally approachable.

The Experiment in the Lab

The demonstration begins in a small, darkened room, where a comfortable chair faces a computer monitor. A laboratory assistant brings in a red rubber bathing cap fitted with 128 sensors arranged across its surface. After placing the cap on the narrator’s head, she applies conductive gel beneath each electrode so faint electrical signals can pass from the scalp to the sensors. Brewer photographs the narrator wearing the apparatus, whose cables give the setup the comic appearance of a tangle of high-tech dreadlocks.

To establish a baseline for activity in the posterior cingulate cortex, Brewer projects adjectives including “courageous,” “cheap,” “patriotic,” and “impulsive.” The narrator is asked not merely to read them but to consider whether each applies personally. That instruction makes the experiment’s target legible: the procedure asks the volunteer to relate words to a sense of self, rather than simply process them as neutral text.

After establishing the baseline, Brewer leads a series of exercises remotely from another room. At the end of each run, lasting a few minutes, a bar graph shows whether posterior cingulate activity has risen above or fallen below baseline in ten-second increments. The narrator can also hear changes as rising and falling tones, but finds the audio too distracting. The sequence makes the feedback procedure concrete: the monitor and tones translate changing activity into signals the volunteer can follow while trying different kinds of thought.

Worcester’s Role in the Book

The Worcester episode gives a physical form to the book’s account of the posterior cingulate cortex as a node involved in the narrative or experiential self. The experiment’s adjective task turns that account into an action: a word becomes personally relevant, and the volunteer’s response is tracked against a baseline. The lab scene thereby links self-reference—not just the content of thought, but the act of relating thought to oneself—to a measurable research procedure.

The visit also extends the book’s comparison between meditation and psychedelic experience without treating them as identical. Brewer’s work concerns meditation and neural feedback, while the surrounding discussion notes that meditation and psilocybin are both associated with reduced activity in the default mode network. Worcester is where the narrator encounters a non-pharmacological way to examine that system directly, through sensors, personal judgments, and moment-by-moment feedback. Its significance in the narrative lies in this shift from abstract explanation to a situated demonstration, not in any broader account of the city.