Six Degrees of Neural Specialization
When you take a class called “Networks”, it becomes pretty clear that your life is legitimately full of networks. Your family tree, the political structure of your country, your decisions in day-to-day life, your presence on social media, and your real-life social circles all fit into various networks. You are a node that influences, operates within, and depends on an infinite number of different networks. While you sit in your class learning about hypothetical networks, the ones in your actual life are growing, shrinking, changing by the minute. What’s this I’m hearing — you get it? You’ve already considered this? 100 times in the last week? I should quit rehashing it? Well, okay.
But you’re not just one consolidated moving piece operating within several world-spanning systems. In fact, there’s an infinite number of complex, vast, and fascinating networks inside you, too. They’re allowing you scroll down on your screen and to read these words. They are, of course, the networks of your brain.
It’s a long-since debunked view in psychology and neuroscience that the brain is entirely differentiated and functionally localized, with different segments serving different purposes and minimal interaction occurring across those section boundaries. Equipotential theory — the idea that all parts of the brain are partially and equally responsible for all processes — is also no longer supported. Most current research is based on an idea that draws from both of these somewhat outdated theories: that different regions serve different primary functional purposes; but these designations are not absolute, and the communication across the varying structures is far from minimal. Structures, pathways, cells, and lobes form networks of neurons, brain structures, and neural pathways that are constantly active.
A recent study conducted by researchers from the University of Iowa in Iowa City and Washington University in St. Louis was based on the premise of six “brain hubs” — that is, central and powerful nodes in neurological networks. The researchers presumed that your brain has six most-important spots in which information is synthesized, and at which communication from one brain region circuit to another occurs. From a networks perspective, these nodes are those with bridges (though if we are to treat it more realistically, the brain is still so poorly understood that it would be wildly amateur to claim that they are actually bridges; they are probably somewhere between local bridges and members of small armies of parallel edges). The predicted hubs weren’t random — they were selected via analysis of existing research and brain imaging. The researchers analyzed the data and personal accounts of 19 patients with reported damage to these critical areas and compared them with 11 neurological patients whose brains were damaged in other areas. They found that “18 of the 19 patients with harm to a hub experienced ‘real-world’ problems, while less than half of the group with injuries far from hubs had such difficulties.” According to the Medical News Today article, brain damage at the hubs were paired with higher levels of general cognitive impairment. Clearly, the large power value of the hubs played a big role in the decay of the networks of which they were members.
Washington University of St. Louis professor of cognitive neuroscience and neurology Steven Peterson said of his work, “This isn’t ready for application in the clinic yet, but as we get a better feel for where these and other hubs are found in the brain, they may factor into surgical decision-making. The risks of surgeries to these sites could include significant impairment of attention, memory, language, speech and many other cognitive functions.” Obviously, this study was certainly not itself extensive enough to generalize any principles of effects of localized brain injury, and its method may or may not be the most efficient way to analyze the “real-world” implications of those effects. But no matter how much it’s been drilled, here’s a new reason to never underestimate relative power in network nodes: Dethroning the dominant ones in high school may topple the regimes of queen bees and make calculus suddenly cool, but messing with them inside your brain changes your traits and your life — not for the better.
Sources:
http://psychology.jrank.org/pages/384/Localization-Brain-Function.html
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/283850.php