Information flows in brain like well-defined travel routes

New York, Jan 24: Just as most of the world’s air travel passes through a few major hubs, the majority of information in the brain flows through similarly well-travelled routes, a team led by an Indian-origin researcher from India University has found. According to the team, 70 percent of all information within cortical regions in the brain passes through only 20 percent of these regions’ neurons. “The discovery of this small but information-rich subset of neurons within cortical regions suggests this sub-network might play a vital role in communication, learning and memory,” said Sunny Nigam, Ph.D. candidate in the IU Bloomington College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Physics and lead author on the study. These high-traffic “hub neurons” could play a role in understanding brain health since this sort of highly efficient network is also more vulnerable to disruption. “The brain seems to favour efficiency over vulnerability,” said John M. Beggs, associate professor of biophysics in a paper appeared the jourl Neuroscience. To conduct the study, scientists recorded small electrical impulses from up to 500 neurons from a part of the brain responsible for the sense of touch.  (IANS)