Robert K. Night writes a perspective in Science (PDF
here) on how neural networks support goal-directed behavior:
Systems neuroscience aims to understand how billions of neurons in the mammalian brain support goal-directed behavior, such as decision making. Deciphering how individual neurons respond to sensory inputs or motor decisions has focused on delineating the neural basis of these processes in discrete regions of the brain's cortex, and has provided key insights into the physiological basis of behavior. However, evidence from neuropsychological, electrophysiological, and neuroimaging studies in humans has revealed that interactions between widespread neural regions in the brain underlie fluid, organized behavior.
He then summarizes work reported in three papers to:
...unravel the details of these interactions by assessing the simultaneous activity of neurons in multiple sites of the mammalian brain. The studies show that network interactions among anatomically discrete brain regions underlie cognitive processing and dispel any phrenological notion that a given innate mental faculty is based solely in just one part of the brain.
...Taken together, the three papers indicate that top-down signals between brain regions regulate the flow of information and that distributed neural networks that use oscillatory dynamics support a broad spectrum of neural processing and behavior. The results in cats and monkeys also nicely parallel findings in humans...this particular coupling mechanism is used to delineate task-specific network activity
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