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A New York Times article reports on a scientific study that identifies “the most complete rough draft to date of the cortex’s electrical architecture, the cluster of interconnected nodes and hubs that help guide thinking and behavior.”  While not conclusive, the findings give scientists a “wiring diagram” that they can test and refine.

The original study was published in the free-access online journal PLoS Biology.

Researchers collaborating at 3 institutions performed a standard functional M.R.I. scan on five healthy male participants, measuring which bundles of their brain cells were most active when the men were at rest.  The technique allows scientists to estimate the density and orientation of the connections running through specific brain locations.  The researchers used a computer analysis that ranked the busiest spots on the cortex in order, by the number of connections they had.  Then they plotted those spots back onto the brain maps of the volunteers.

The same areas overlapped with “network hubs that the group had already identified. In previous studies, activation in these areas has been associated with wandering thought and acute self-awareness.  In the jargon of the field, these areas “run hot” continuously during waking hours and consume far more energy than more peripheral areas.”  The hubs clustered in each brain, in a region about the size of a palm, were centered atop the cortex like a small skullcap.

One of the scientists said that continued research should help produce a complete and detailed neural wiring diagram of the brain. “We hope we can get to a place where we have, in effect, a brain simulator, in the same way we have computer models that can simulate the climate,” he said, “so we can simulate activation patterns we see in clinical cases,” like psychiatric problems and brain injuries.