Brain Architecture

Book excerpt: The brain has been viewed as an organ, machine, biological computer, and nervous system component. What are its major parts and how are they interconnected to generate thinking, feelings, and behaviour? Designed for undergraduates in neuroscience, this work surveys 2500 years of scientific thinking about these questions from the perspective of fundamental architectural principles. It proposes an alternative model for the basic plan of neural systems organization based on an explosion of structural data from the neuroanatomy revolution of the 1970s. Possible relationships between neural networks and gene networks revealed by the human genome project are also explored.