Brain regions might carry out well-defined functions— edge detection in primary visual cortex, “error monitoring” in the anterior cingulate cortex, and so on. But regions don’t function alone, so when they combine in functional circuits or networks, the behavior of the circuit/network might lead to emergent behaviors, as discussed in …
Emergence might be incontrovertible to physicists or mathematicians, but not in neuroscience. Why is it so controversial? One reason seems clear. It’s fair to say that neuroscience follows what could be called Herbert Simon’s dictum: we’re interested and indeed comfortable in taking on research problems and domains that involve near-decomposable …
Neuroscience tends to study parts of the brain separately. The Entangled Brain promotes the idea that, instead, we need to understand the brain as a complex, entangled system. Accordingly, the business of a brain region needs to be situated in the context of multi-region circuits: What does a brain region …
