Chapter 1 — An Introduction to Brain Network
????????It is often said that the brain is the most complex network known to man. A human brain comprises about 100 billion (10^11) neurons connected by about 100 trillion (10^14) synapses, which are anatomically organized over multiple scales of space and functionally interactive over multiple scales of time.?This vast system is the biological hardware from which all our thoughts, feelings, and behavior emerge. Clinical disorders of human brain networks, like?dementia?and?schizophrenia, are among the most disabling and therapeutically(adv. 在治療上) intractable (adj.很難對(duì)付/處理的) global health problems.?It is therefore unsurprising that understanding brain network connectivity has long been a central goal of?neuroscience, and has recently catalyzed an unprecedented era of large-scale initiatives and collaborative projects to map brain networks more comprehensively and in greater detail than ever before?As we will see, one of the implications of modern brain network science is that the human brain may not, in fact, be a uniquely complex system. However, it is certainly timely, challenging and important to understand its organization more clearly.
Central to current thinking about brain networks is the concept of the?connectome.
"Connectome is defined as a matrix representing all possible pairwise anatomical(結(jié)構(gòu)) connections between neural elements of the brain."
