|
Washington:
Our brains have regions that are "rich" - or highly connected to
other parts of the brain - and other parts are subservient to this
'Rich Club', scientists have discovered.
"We've known...that the brain has some regions that are 'rich' in
the sense of being highly connected to many other parts of the
brain," said Olaf Sporns, professor in brain sciences at the
Indiana University College of Arts and Sciences.
"It now turns out that these regions are not only individually
rich, they are forming a 'rich club.' They are strongly linked to
each other, exchanging information and collaborating," added
Sporns, the Journal of Neuroscience reports.
"You sort of wonder what they're talking about when they're
communicating with each other," he said. "All these regions are
getting all kinds of highly processed information, from virtually
all parts of the brain," said Sporns, according to an Indiana
statement.
The rich club might be the "G8 summit of our brain," said Martijn
van den Heuvel, professor at the Rudolf Magnus Institute of
Neuroscience, Utrecht, The Netherlands, who co-write the study.
"It's a group of highly influential regions that keep each other
informed and likely collaborate on issues that concern whole brain
functioning," said Sporn. "Figuring out what is discussed at this
summit might be an important step in understanding how our brain
works."
The research is part of an ongoing intensive effort to map the
intricate networks of the human brain, casting the brain as an
integrated dynamic system rather than a set of individual regions.
Using a form of MRI, van den Heuvel and Sporns examined the brains
of a group of healthy men and women and mapped their large-scale
network connectivity.
They found a group of 12 strongly interconnected hubs. Most of
them are engaged in a wide range of complex behavioral and
cognitive tasks, rather than more specialized processing such as
vision and motor control.
If the brain network involving the rich club is disrupted or
damaged, said Sporns, the negative impact would likely be
disproportionate because of its central position in the network
and the number of connections it contains.
Conversely, damage to regions outside of the rich club would
likely cause specific impairments but would likely have little
influence on the global flow of information throughout the brain.
|
Comments
|
Quick links