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Wellcome Early Career Research Fellow Dr Andrea Luppi outlines his new paper, which found that parts of the brain work in competition, as well as co-operation, and how this can have implications for the development of digital brain twins and artificial intelligence, which could help advance science and healthcare. The new paper has been published in Nature Neuroscience, was co-authored by an international team including Professor Morten Kringelbach in Oxford and Professor Gustavo Deco.
What is your new study about?
The brain is often described as a highly cooperative system, with specialised regions working together to support cognition and behaviour. However, everyday experience from focusing attention also reveals that brain systems must compete for limited resources.
Our new study shows that this balance between cooperation and competition is a fundamental principle of how the brains of humans and other animals function, which can translate to more brain-like artificial intelligence. Computer models of the brain that are based on this principle are also more faithful to how real brains work, providing a key step towards precision medicine.
In our large comparative study across humans, macaque monkeys, and mice, our international team of researchers used advanced computer modelling to reveal that the most realistic models of brain activity require not only cooperative interactions within specialised brain circuits, but also widespread, long-range competitive interactions between them.
What did you find?
We compared two types of computational brain models: one in which all interactions between brain regions were cooperative, and another in which regions could either excite or suppress each other’s activity. Across all three species, the models that included competitive interactions consistently outperformed cooperative-only models.
Read the full story on the Department of Psychiatry website.