Tangling with the Entangled Brain: Putting the Global Back into the Local

Abstract

Pessoa's precis “The Entangled Brain” is a call to action. The larger concepts resonate with existing complex systems frameworks in general and in neuroscience in particular, especially in the fields of connectomics and criticality (Cocchi, Gollo, Zalesky, & Breakspear, 2017; Bassett & Gazzaniga, 2011). What is provocative from our perspective is that despite recognizing the brain as a complex system, the experimental approaches adopted by our community largely fail to align with this recognition. In this commentary, we lay out the fundamental challenge Pessoa brings to the neuroscience community: to engage with the brain, conceptually and experimentally, as a complex whole.

The tip of the iceberg: a call to embrace anti-localizationism in human neuroscience research

“…Researchers often take the perspective of treating physiological or environmental variables as confounds to be removed in order to "isolate" neural mechanisms. However, there is a growing focus on how brain function and disease is dependent upon the physiological and environmental contexts within which it is immersed 3,[37][38][39] . Furthermore, recent work illustrates how social and environmental factors can act as an intrinsic scaffolding necessary for the creation of brain-behavior models 40 .…”