Complementary Processes
The idea that the brain is separated into two complementary processing networks (task positive and task negative) has recently become an area of increasing interest. The task positive network deals with externally oriented processing whereas the task negative network deals with internally oriented processing. Research indicates that these networks are not exclusive and some tasks overlap in their activation. A study done in 2009 shows encoding success and novelty detection activity within the task-positive network have significant overlap and have thus been concluded to reflect common association of externally-oriented processing. It also demonstrates how encoding failure and retrieval success share significant overlap within the task negative network indicating common association of internally oriented processing. Finally, a low level of overlap between encoding success and retrieval success activity and between encoding failure and novelty detection activity respectively indicate opposing modes or processing. In sum task positive and task negative networks can have common associations during the performance of different tasks.
Read more about this topic: Encoding (memory)
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“The vast results obtained by Science are won by no mystical faculties, by no mental processes other than those which are practiced by every one of us, in the humblest and meanest affairs of life. A detective policeman discovers a burglar from the marks made by his shoe, by a mental process identical with that by which Cuvier restored the extinct animals of Montmartre from fragments of their bones.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)