Hidden Nodes of the Brain Systems

Abstract

The functional organization of the brain systems underlying higher order human activity is one of the key issues of modern psychophysiology and neurophysiology. Despite the continuous development of new methods, the relationships between the activity of individual cells (and their groups) and the activity of large brain areas observed by means of functional tomography are not yet fully understood. In this paper, we propose a solution for this problem basing on the common patterns of the principles of functional brain activity at the micro- (cells) and macro- (brain areas) levels. We compared the previously identified principles of the dynamic organization of the multicellular neuronal activity of the human brain with the recent fMRI findings basing on the combined analysis of local characteristics of energy consumption by the brain structures and their distant interactions. As a result, we assumed that many brain systems are composed of a large number of hidden nodes. Those nodes are included in the systems in certain periods only. For a wide range of activities, the brain regions are systematically involved in the actively working brain systems as hidden nodes, i.e., without changing their energy consumption, which was observed at both micro- and macro-levels of functional brain activity. These findings reflect the new phenomenon of the “hidden nodes” of the brain systems.