The Unlikely Network at the Core of Your Brain’s Internet...

The rich club network, highlighted here in red, is more highly connected than 
the rest of the brain. (Image: Martijn van den Heuvel, Journal of Neuroscience.)

To successfully send a text message, your brain has to compose the wording and coordinate the deft tapping of your thumbs while checking for typos. Solving a simple algebra problem involves the visual cortex — to process the symbols — and the parts of the brain used for computation and short-term memory. And driving, best performed without texting, requires a combination of visual, tactile and spatial data. How do different areas of the brain communicate and coordinate their efforts to complete these tasks? Neuroscientists have long struggled to understand the brain’s ability to synthesize a dog’s breakfast of sensory inputs and cognitive processes.

But a growing body of evidence suggests that a network of highly interlinked brain regions exists that could prove essential in facilitating higher-order tasks. This collection of highly connected hubs has been dubbed the “rich club” network because it resembles groups of well-connected individuals, such as Ivy League alumni organizations, that help others meet and exchange information.

Within the brain, researchers “think that rich clubs have a key role to play in making global communication efficient and are also important for supporting integration of information,” said Olaf Sporns, a computational neuroscientist at Indiana University in Bloomington. Sporns first described the rich club in the brain, along with collaborator Martijn van den Heuvel, a neuroscientist at the Brain Center Rudolf Magnus in the Netherlands.

Sporns and others hope that studying the rich club will help solve one of the biggest challenges in neuroscience: linking the brain’s structure with its function. While each can be measured using different technologies, attempts to reconcile structural and functional information have proven elusive.

“It’s absolutely relevant to know as much as we can about the topology of the underlying structure to understand the function,” said Gustavo Deco, a neuroscientist at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain....[...] www.wired.com