The Entangled Brain: How Perception, Cognition, and Emotion Are Woven Together

A new vision of the brain as a fully integrated, networked organ.

Popular  neuroscience accounts often focus on specific mind-brain aspects like  addiction, cognition, or memory, but The Entangled Brain tackles a much  bigger question: What kind of object is the brain? Neuroscientist Luiz  Pessoa describes the brain as a highly networked, interconnected system  that cannot be neatly decomposed into a set of independent parts. One  can’t point to the brain and say, “This is where emotion happens” (or  any other mental faculty). Pessoa argues that only by understanding how  large-scale neural circuits combine multiple and diverse signals can we  truly appreciate how the brain supports the mind.

Presenting the  brain as an integrated organ and drawing on neuroscience, computation,  mathematics, systems theory, and evolution, The Entangled Brain explains  how brain functions result from cross-cutting brain processing, not the  function of segregated areas. Parts of the brain work in a coordinated  fashion across large-scale distributed networks in which disparate parts  of the cortex and the subcortex work simultaneously to bring about  behaviors. Pessoa intuitively explains the concepts needed to formalize  this idea of the brain as a complex system and how to unleash powerful  understandings built with “collective computations.”