The Entangled Brain

A new vision of the brain as a fully integrated, networked organ.

Popular neuroscience accounts often focus on specific mind-brain aspects like addiction, cognition, or memory, but The Entangled Brain tackles a much bigger question: What kind of object is the brain? Neuroscientist Luiz Pessoa describes the brain as a highly networked, interconnected system that cannot be neatly decomposed into a set of independent parts. One can’t point to the brain and say, “This is where emotion happens” (or any other mental faculty). Pessoa argues that only by understanding how large-scale neural circuits combine multiple and diverse signals can we truly appreciate how the brain supports the mind.

Presenting the brain as an integrated organ and drawing on neuroscience, computation, mathematics, systems theory, and evolution, The Entangled Brain explains how brain functions result from cross-cutting brain processing, not the function of segregated areas. Parts of the brain work in a coordinated fashion across large-scale distributed networks in which disparate parts of the cortex and the subcortex work simultaneously to bring about behaviors. Pessoa intuitively explains the concepts needed to formalize this idea of the brain as a complex system and how to unleash powerful understandings built with “collective computations.”Preface ix
1 From One Area at a Time to Networked Systems 1
2 Learning a Bit of Anatomy 15
3 The Minimal Brain: Building Simple Defenses and Seeking Rewards 31
4 What Do Brain Areas Do? 47
5 Emotion and Motivation: The Subcortical Players 65
6 Emotion and Motivation: The Cortex Comes to the Party 93
7 Cognition and the Prefrontal Cortex 111
8 Complex Systems: The Science of Interacting Parts 129
9 500 Million Years of Evolution 145
10 The Big Network: Putting Things Together 167
11 Unlearning Fear 193
12 It's All about Complex, Entangled Networks 215
Glossary 231
Notes 235
References 247
Index 261“Luiz Pessoa’s The Entangled Brain should be welcomed as an equally informed and bold endeavor. . . Thanks to its engaging style, Pessoa’s book is ultimately aimed at all readers who are interested in how the brain really works.”
—Cognitive Neuropsychiatry

“The Entangled Brain is part survey, part manifesto. It provides an interesting and valuable overview of recent research on emotion, learning, extinction learning, the evolution of the human brain, and other phenomena, interspersed with pleas for a different approach to studying the mind and brain…Pessoa’s guiding theme is easily stated: neuroscience has been dominated by a view that the brain can be understood via an analysis into small, local functional units, but the actual functions that cause behavior are highly distributed and a proper understanding of them will not be possible with a reductive local account.”
—Metascience


“Pessoa's enthusiasm for his 'favourite topic' permeates the text and makes reading a pleasure....Throughout this iconoclastic volume, the concept of the brain as a sophisticated complex system is illuminated by real life examples....[Pessoa] has certainly achieved his aim.”
—The British Neuroscience Association“It’s all about complex, entangled networks. That’s the theme of this superb book about the brain and its role in generating cognition and behavior. For anyone who wants to learn about the brain and its relationship to the mind, this book is essential reading.”
—Evan Thompson, author of Mind in Life and Waking, Dreaming, Being;coauthor of The Embodied Mind
 
“In this ambitious book, Luiz Pessoa deftly argues the case that the brain is not a modular system that can be understood one region at a time, but rather a complex network of interconnected, interdependent parts. Drawing from comparative neuroanatomy, mathematical biology, and complex systems theory, he convincingly demonstrates that brain regions can participate in specific functions only when embedded within larger networks. In this highly readable work that will appeal to everyone from curious youths to seasoned neuroscientists, he takes on the age-old question: How does the brain work? It turns out, the answer is: It’s complicated.”
—Lucina Q. Uddin, Professor, University of California Los AngelesLuiz Pessoa is Professor of Psychology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Director of the Maryland Neuroimaging Center. He is the author of The Cognitive-Emotional Brain (The MIT Press).