Hypothesis-driven structural connectivity analysis supports network over hierarchical model of brain architecture

Abstract

The brain is usually described as hierarchically organized, although an alternative network model has been proposed. To help distinguish between these two fundamentally different structure-function hypotheses, we developed an experimental circuit-tracing strategy that can be applied to any starting point in the nervous system and then systematically expanded, and applied it to a previously obscure dorsomedial corner of the nucleus accumbens identified functionally as a "hedonic hot spot." A highly topographically organized set of connections involving expected and unexpected gray matter regions was identified that prominently features regions associated with appetite, stress, and clinical depression. These connections are arranged as a longitudinal series of circuits (closed loops). Thus, the results do not support a rigidly hierarchical model of nervous system organization but instead indicate a network model of organization. In principle, the double-coinjection circuit tracing strategy can be applied systematically to the rest of the nervous system to establish the architecture of the global structural wiring diagram, and its abstraction, the connectome.