Avoiding the notion of an "homunculus" in the brain ... or any single, overlord power that controls the function and decisions of the brain has been a deeply embedded faux pas in the neuroscience and neurophilosophy circles for many decades.

After years of trying to be accepted into a peer-reviewed journal, Prof. Asim Roy of Arizona State University will have his day in the sun. Using established ideas from the "connectionist" model of the brain--where information and control processing is considered to be distributed and non-local--he actually claims to proves that a hierarchical system exists in brain function.

One potential realization of this hypothesis (because we cannot call any idea related to brain function a theory, yet!) is that if Prof. Roy's ideas are correct, then the brain may in fact work more like conventional computer artificial intelligence systems of today, which have countless rules pre-programmed in the code to provide the resulting behavior of the AI software or machine. If this is the case, then we may only need a sufficiently large enough processor chip to emulate true human brain behavior and the Singularity Event might come sooner than expected.

Although Neuron News carries a strong bias against the notion that the human brain is locally-controlled (even though it feels like we have a conscious single controller sitting in our heads), these alternative ideas are still important to progress with advances in understanding brain function. Are we at a road-block? We need to somehow break-through our limited ability to grasp the essentially higher-dimensionality of complex networks, and it's going to take one exciting "ah-ha!" moment to get there... so let us know if you have one.