Human white matter and knowledge representation

Abstract

Understanding how knowledge is represented in the human brain is a fundamental challenge in neuroscience. To date, most of the work on this topic has focused on knowledge representation in cortical areas and debated whether knowledge is represented in a distributed or localized fashion. Fang and colleagues provide evidence that brain connections and the white matter supporting such connections might play a significant role. The work opens new avenues of investigation, breaking through disciplinary boundaries across network neuroscience, computational neuroscience, cognitive science, and classical lesion studies.