"The Entangled Brain: How Perception, Cognition, and Emotion Are Woven Together

 this quote from "The Entangled Brain: How Perception, Cognition, and Emotion Are Woven Together" by Pessoa, Luiz -

"A central thesis of the book is that biology does not work like physics, and even less so like engineering. Biological systems are not easily reducible to separate units that, when put together, give us the whole back. Unfortunately, in my view, even brain scientists (many of them, at least) don’t fully appreciate this idea. Their descriptions of the brain are full of labels for brain regions, indicating that they perform function X (here’s “fear”) or Y (here’s “reward”), as if the separate pieces functioned quasi-autonomously. This thinking reflects a mapping between structure (anatomy) and function (behavior) that goes back more than a century. For example, in the early twentieth century, Korbinian Brodmann, an early neuroanatomist, subdivided the human brain into roughly 50 specific anatomical units that were thought to map to relatively distinct functions. To this day, Brodmann’s map and its refinements are routinely used by researchers. Indeed, one of the central approaches of neuroscience has been a divide-and-conquer strategy that tries to break up the entire organ into subcomponents that can be, purportedly, properly understood. They then can be put back together in the hope that the overall functionality will reflect the summed individual parts. I believe this strategy is problematic; in fact, it is inadequate to understand systems like the brain (and genetics by the way) in which the interactions among the parts create mechanisms and processes than cannot be derived by looking at parts in isolation. In The Entangled Brain, I wanted to avoid what I find in many general-audience books—namely, descriptions that simplify the brain to such an extreme as to appear, at times, caricatures. For example, in the context of emotion and motivation, an often-heard narrative is that primitive, subcortical regions like the amygdala (presumably “responsible for fear”) and the striatum (presumably “responsible for reward”) produce automatic behaviors that are next-to-impossible to subvert—hence, anxiety disorders and addiction. At the same time, the prefrontal cortex, the “newer and more rational” part of the brain, allows us to exert control over the subcortical bits and correct behaviors when appropriate (no cake-eating if one is on a diet, as an example). The treatment in the pages that follow adheres to a way of thinking that eschews these first-order explanations. The resulting story is not so simple, but I believe readers are more than ready to face the complexity. We don’t have to put functions inside little boxes in the brain and tell neat stories. Reality is immensely more complex. The view formulated here is that parts of the brain work in a coordinated fashion, such that functions are carried out by large-scale distributed circuits, also called large-scale networks. In other words, collections of gray matter parts exchange signals with one another and, by doing so, bring about behaviors. The circuits are distributed, not local, involving disparate parts in the cortex and the subcortex, for example. And they are “large scale” because they don’t only involve a pair, or possibly a few regions, but many components working simultaneously. That is the sense in which the brain is entangled, as summarized by the book’s title. The overall goal of the book is to introduce the central nervous system to readers in a sophisticated yet engaging manner—I hope! The text exposes readers to some of the complexities surrounding our understanding of the brain, without submitting the reader to a tsunami of technicalities."

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