The article essentially states that there are only two modes of interaction between nodes; neural or Internet.  It’s similar to arguing at the birth of the steam engine that the brain is a mist or ghost in a machine, it’s not simply technological determinism it’s “Network Discourse Hegemony”.

BBC

The brain appears to be a vastly interconnected network much like the Internet, according to new research.

That runs counter to the 19th-Century “top-down” view of brain structure.

A novel technique to track signals across tiny brain regions has revealed connections between regions associated with stress, depression and appetite.

The research, which has been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, may lead to a full map of the nervous system.

Larry Swanson and Richard Thompson from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, US, isolated a small section of a rat’s brain in the nucleus accumbens – a brain region long associated with pleasure and reward.

Their technique hinges on the injection of “tracers” at precise points in the brain tissue. These are molecules that do not interfere with the movement of signals across the tissue, but can be illuminated and identified using a microscope.

Loops not lines

What is new is that the researchers injected two tracers at the same point at the same time: one that showed where signals were going, and one that showed where they were coming from. The approach can show up to four levels of connection.

If the brain has a hierarchichal structure like a large company, as neurology has long held, the “to” and “from” diagram would show straight lines from independent regions up towards a central processing unit: the company’s boss.

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The tyranny of the algorithm is upon us.