Which One Are You? The 12 Talking Brains Inside Your Head

As part of an ongoing effort to map the human "connectome" – the full network of connections in the brain – Martijn van den Heuvel of the University Medical Center in Utrecht, the Netherlands, and Olaf Sporns of Indiana University Bloomington scanned the brains of 21 people as they rested for 30 minutes.

The researchers used a technique called diffusion tensor imaging to track the movements of water through 82 separate areas of the brain and their interconnecting neurons. They found 12 areas of the brain had significantly more connections than all the others, both to other regions and among themselves.

"These 12 regions have twice the connections of other brain regions, and they're more strongly connected to each other than to other regions," says Van den Heuvel. "If we wanted to look for consciousness in the brain, I would bet on it turning out to be this rich club," he adds. _NewScientist

These twelve brain activity centres -- six on each side of the brain -- are very fastidious about the information they will accept for processing. They refuse to accept raw sensory data, preferring rich, highly processed and refined information instead.

Here are the six hubs that each of your two brain halves possess:

Best connected of all is the precuneus, an area at the back of the brain. Van den Heuvel says its function is not well understood, but thinks that it acts as an "integrator region" collating high-level information from all over the brain.

Another prominent hub is the superior frontal cortex, which plans actions in response to events and governs where you should focus your attention. The superior parietal cortex – the third hub – is linked to the visual cortex and registers where different objects in your immediate vicinity are.

To bring memory into the equation, the hippocampus is another hub – that's where memories are processed, stored and consolidated. The fifth member of the club is the thalamus, which, among other things, interlinks visual processes; the last member, the putamen, coordinates movement.

Together the hubs enable the brain to constantly assess, prioritise and filter incoming information, and then puts it all together to make decisions about what to do next. _NewScientist

New Scientist
It is best to consider these hubs as central starting points in a complex and redundant maze of activity, that has no beginning and no end. Understanding how these centres communicate among themselves should provide cognitive scientists with a significant foundation for expanding the ideas of consciousness beyond their current human limits.

"The human brain is extraordinarily complex, yet it works efficiently, and a major challenge has been to discover principles of brain wiring and organisation that explain this," says Randy Buckner, a neuroscientist at Harvard University.

"What Van den Heuvel and Sporns show is that some regions of the brain are embedded in densely connected networks – so-called rich clubs – that may act together as a functional unit," says Buckner. "Such an organisation might help explain how complex networks of brain regions can work together efficiently." _NS

The above researchers at Utrecht and Indiana simulated a brain based upon the discovered connectivity, and learned that when one hub went down, it could take down the other hubs -- like a cascading network failure.

This is a particularly fertile area of brain research, which is likely to spawn a large number of diverging discoveries of importance.