Looking Toward the Future: Perspectives on Examining the Architecture and Function of the Human Brain as a Complex System

Abstract

With the arrival of increasingly sophisticated methodologies, cognitive neuroscience has quickly matured into a remarkably prolific field. However, amid such progress, it is possible to lose sight of the overarching purpose of the field, which is to promote an understanding of how the brain creates the marvels of the mind. We argue that viewing the brain as a complex system is a useful way of regaining this perspective. Here, we consider fundamental characteristics of brain organization and function in hopes of finding analogous complex systems that might yield novel insight into how cognitive function and subject experience emerge from activity in distributed regions of the brain.