Revisiting the global workspace orchestrating the hierarchical organization of the human brain

Deco, Gustavo; Vidaurre, Diego; Kringelbach, Morten L.

doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-01003-6

Revisiting the global workspace orchestrating the hierarchical organization of the human brain

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Deco G, Vidaurre D, Kringelbach ML. Revisiting the global workspace orchestrating the hierarchical organization of the human brain. Nat Hum Behav. 2021 Jan 4;5:497–511. DOI: 10.1038/s41562-020-01003-6

Abstract

A central challenge in neuroscience is how the brain organizes the information necessary to orchestrate behaviour. Arguably, this whole-brain orchestration is carried out by a core subset of integrative brain regions, a ‘global workspace’, but its constitutive regions remain unclear. We quantified the global workspace as the common regions across seven tasks as well as rest, in a common ‘functional rich club’. To identify this functional rich club, we determined the information flow between brain regions by means of a normalized directed transfer entropy framework applied to multimodal neuroimaging data from 1,003 healthy participants and validated in participants with retest data. This revealed a set of regions orchestrating information from perceptual, long-term memory, evaluative and attentional systems. We confirmed the causal significance and robustness of our results by systematically lesioning a generative whole-brain model. Overall, this framework describes a complex choreography of the functional hierarchical organization of the human brain.