High-cost, high-capacity backbone for global brain communication
Open accessAbstract
Network studies of human brain structural connectivity have identified a specific set of brain regions that are both highly connected and highly central. Recent analyses have shown that these putative hub regions are mutually and densely interconnected, forming a “rich club” within the human brain. Here we show that the set of pathways linking rich club regions forms a central high-cost, high-capacity backbone for global brain communication. Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) data of two sets of 40 healthy subjects were used to map structural brain networks. The contributions to network cost and communication capacity of global cortico-cortical connections were assessed through measures of their topology and spatial embedding. Rich club connections were found to be more costly than predicted by their density alone and accounted for 40% of the total communication cost. Furthermore, 69% of all minimally short paths between node pairs were found to travel through the rich club and a large proportion of these communication paths consisted of ordered sequences of edges (“path motifs”) that first fed into, then traversed, and finally exited the rich club, while passing through nodes of increasing and then decreasing degree. The prevalence of short paths that follow such ordered degree sequences suggests that neural communication might take advantage of strategies for dynamic routing of information between brain regions, with an important role for a highly central rich club. Taken together, our results show that rich club connections make an important contribution to interregional signal traffic, forming a central high-cost, high-capacity backbone for global brain communication.
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Richly connected subnetworks are metabolically expensive, consuming nearly 50% of cortical metabolism in humans.
“but are also metabolically expensive, consuming nearly 50% of cortical metabolism in humans (Heuvel et al., 2012)”
From An Integrated World Modeling Theory (IWMT) of Consciousness (2020) · cites this paper as Heuvel et al., 2012
The dynamics of the default mode, salience and frontoparietal control networks form the computational core of a brain's dynamic internal working model of the body in the world, entraining sensory and motor systems to create multi-sensory representations of the world at various time scales from the perspective of someone who has a body, all in the service of allostasis.
“My key hypothesis is that the dynamics of the default mode, salience and frontoparietal control networks form the computational core of a brain’s dynamic internal working model of the body in the world, entraining sensory and motor systems to create multi-sensory representations of the world at various time scales from the perspective of someone who has a body, all in the service of allostasis (”
From The theory of constructed emotion: an active inference account of interoception and categorization (2016) · cites this paper as van den Heuvel et al., 2012
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Self-citation
- Authors
- van den Heuvel, M. P., Kahn, R. S., Goñi, J., & Sporns, O.
- Affiliations
- Department of Psychiatry, University Medical Center Utrecht, Rudolf Magnus Institute of Neuroscience, 3905 GA, Utrecht, The Netherlands; and
- University Medical Center Utrecht (NL)
- Indiana University Bloomington (US)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Publisher
- National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 2012-06-18
- Volume
- 109
- Issue
- 28
- Pages
- 11372-11377
- ISSN
- 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-6490
- PMC
- PMC3396547
- OpenAlex
- W1990574575
- Cited by
- 781
- References
- 5
- Citations by year
- 2026: 30 · 2025: 38 · 2024: 41 · 2023: 63 · 2022: 69 · 2021: 47 · 2020: 65 · 2019: 75 · 2018: 68 · 2017: 43 · 2016: 74 · 2015: 63 · 2014: 56 · 2013: 45 · 2012: 4
- FWCI
- 27.54
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Pure Amsterdam UMC (publishedVersion, other-oa)
- Amsterdam UMC (VU Amsterdam) - Institutional Repository (publishedVersion, other-oa)
- Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Functional Brain Connectivity Studies
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging › Advanced Neuroimaging Techniques and Applications
- Physical Sciences › Physics and Astronomy › Statistical and Nonlinear Physics › Complex Network Analysis Techniques
- Keywords
- rich club, structural brain connectivity, network cost, communication skills, hub regions, corticocortical connections, information routing, diffusion tensor imaging, brain network topology
- MeSH terms
- Algorithms, Brain, Brain Mapping, Communication, Humans, Models, Biological, Models, Neurological, Neural Pathways, Neurons, Models, Statistical, Diffusion Tensor Imaging
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