The Brain As A Network

"The brain is an enormously complicated system of interconnected cells. To give a rough estimate, Johnson and Wu suggest that the human brain has 10¹² neurons with 10¹⁵ synapses¹. To wrap your head around the magnitude of 10¹⁵ synapses, consider that it's about 222 times greater than the distance from Earth to Pluto in meters². How do you begin to understand all the madness compressed into the three pound ball of flesh? I have no idea, and I don't trust anyone who claims to know either. However, there are some clever approaches to chipping away at the problem.

At the systems-level, the brain distributes computation over multiple regions. A good analogy is a peer-to-peer network that distributes number crunching across multiple computers, where each computer is specialized to perform some specific aspect of the computation. Abstract this by simply calling the computers "nodes" (which can represent anything, for example, brain regions) and the connections "edges," and viola! you have reached the entry point of network theory, which is a quantitative and visual approach to understanding how nodes relate to one another and how networks function as a whole."

Consultar: The Artful Brain.