When we consider the highways traversing the brain and how signals establish behaviourally relevant relationships across the central nervous system, we come to an important insight. In a highly interconnected system, to understand function, we need to shift away from thinking in terms of individual brain regions. The functional unit is not to be found at the level of the brain area, as commonly proposed. Instead, we need to consider neuronal ensembles distributed across multiple brain regions, much like the murmuration of starlings forms a single pattern from the collective behaviour of individual birds.
Brain regions dynamically affiliate with multiple networks in a context-dependent manner, forming coalitions that assemble and disassemble based on current demands. This interactional complexity means that functions aren’t localised to discrete modules but emerge from decentralised coordination across multiregion assemblies. The properties that emerge from these interactions cannot be reduced to individual components, making a strict modular framework inadequate for capturing the brain’s entangled nature.
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