Our brain "is wired like the Internet"

The brain is organized and is wired as a large interconnected system - similar to the internet - not as a hierarchical system where orders are given from the top, as was believed for a long time.
The brain is organized and is wired as a large interconnected system - similar to the internet - not as a hierarchical system where orders are given from the top, as was believed for a long time, says new research.

The finding came after Larry Swanson and Richard Thompson of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, United States, invented a new technique to follow the sign of small regions of the brain associated with stress, depression or appetite.
The results of their research, were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, could lead to a new map of the entire nervous system.
Scientists isolated a small section of the brain of a rat in the core accumbes, a region associated with pleasure and reward.
They injected locators - molecules that do not interfere with the movement of signals throughout the tissue, but serve to illuminate and identify them in different areas to look at them through a microscope - in particular parts of the brain tissue.The novelty was that the researchers injected two markers in each of the points at once: one showing where they were going signals and one who taught where they came from.
With this approach could be seen up to four levels of connection.

If the brain had a hierarchical structure of the brain, such as large companies - as neuroscience has long maintained - the diagram would have shown hotlines between different brain regions in the direction of a processing unit: the boss's office of the company.
Instead, scientists found curves and meanderings between different parts of the brain, and direct links between regions are not known to communicate with each other.

And this model agrees more with the idea that the brain is a large communication network, similar to the Internet.The hypothesis of a highly correlated structure as had been circulating for some time and could be an important tool for analyzing the brain processes information organization.

Our Brain  like the Internet

"We were surprised to see how much of the current experimental neuroscience literature is dominated by the thought that the brain acts as a hierarchical structure, which dates back to the nineteenth century, especially in neurology," Swanson told the teacher the BBC .

"The important thing is that regardless of what we create, the circuit has been shown, the specific set of structural connections, had not been demonstrated before."
The work illuminates a small tip of the iceberg of the huge number of connections present even in the brains of smaller mammals.But by superimposing the map of the different regions may get a big picture of how everything works.
"The method can be repeated in a reasonable manner, so that neuronal connections may continue to arrive and finally there where you can get the entire wiring diagram of the brain," said Swanson.
The diagram could be endlessly complex and the degree to which could shed light on slippery issues as consciousness or cognition is still debated.