Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

We study to what extent cortical columns with their particular wiring, could boost neural computation. Upon a vast survey of columnar networks performing various real-world cognitive tasks, we detect no signs of the expected enhancement. It is on a mesoscopic?intercolumnar?scale that the wiring among the columns, largely irrespective of their inner organization, enhances the speed of information transfer and minimizes the total wiring length required to bind distributed columnar computations towards spatiotemporally coherent results. We suggest that brain efficiency may be related to a doubly fractal connectivity law, resulting in networks with efficiency properties beyond those by scale-free networks and we exhibit corroborating evidence for this suggestion. Despite the current emphasis on simpler, e.g., critical, networks, networks with more than one connectivity decay behavior may be the rule rather than the exception. Ref: Beyond Scale-Free Small-World Networks: Cortical Columns for Quick Brains Ralph Stoop, Victor Saase, Clemens Wagner, Britta Stoop, and Ruedi Stoop, PRL 108105 (2013)