Entangled Brain

Most popular books on the brain focus on a single piece of the puzzle, such as addiction, thinking, or memory. Luiz Pessoa, a neuroscientist, takes a broader view and asks what kind of thing the brain actually is. In his account, it is a densely linked system whose workings cannot be split into separate components, so no single region can be named as the home of emotion or any other mental faculty.

Pessoa argues that we can understand how the brain supports the mind only once we see how large-scale neural circuits merge many different kinds of signals. Behaviors arise when parts of the cerebral cortex and the subcortex operate together at the same time across broad, distributed networks. On this view, brain functions come from processes that cut across traditional areas rather than from isolated, self-contained regions.

To build this case, the book draws on neuroscience, computation, mathematics, systems theory, and evolution. Pessoa explains in accessible terms the concepts needed to describe the brain as a complex system, and shows how these tools can reveal what he calls collective computation.