9. How do specialized parts of the brain integrate with one another?
To the untrained eye, the brain looks like a wrinkly, pink blob. Flip open any medical textbook, however, and you will probably find a color-coded map of the different regions of the brain, with each area responsible for functions such as speech (pre-frontal cortex), sight (occipital lobe), long-term memory (temporal lobe) and so on.
This sub-division of labor within the brain is a rough guide at best, and many functions actually require rapid communication between multiple brain regions. However, no one part of the brain acts as a control center that integrates signals from various regions. Instead, multiple parallel connections seem to form a dense and overlapping network between the different regions. Teasing out the pathways linked to specific processes is likely to occupy neuroscientists for decades to come.
