Modern neuroscience understands the brain as a set of specialized systems. Aspects of brain function such as attention, perception, memory, language, and thought have been mapped onto distinct brain networks, and each has been examined largely in isolation.

While this approach has yielded major advances, it has left unresolved one of the most basic facts about human cognition: its overall unity as an integrated system.

Now, researchers at the University of Notre Dame have conducted a neuroimaging study to investigate how the brain is organized and how that integrated system gives rise to intelligence. Their study was published in the journal Nature Communications.