Brooks: Neuroscience likens the mind to shifting networks, not fixed modules

David Brooks writes in a New York Times opinion essay (Jan. 16, 2026) that modern neuroscience increasingly portrays the mind as a dynamic network of interacting regions — a system more like a murmuration of starlings than a set of fixed modules. Brooks contrasts earlier modular thinking, which assigned functions to single structures (for example, emotion to the amygdala), with a newer view that emphasizes vast, interconnected webs of neurons.

He cites Luiz Pessoa’s metaphor of a flock of starlings and Pessoa’s phrase that the brain creates “neuronal ensembles distributed across multiple brain regions” that together “form a single pattern from the collective behavior.” From that metaphor, Brooks draws implications for education and psychology: individual minds vary like distinct swirls, standardized sorting looks dehumanizing, and behavior is context-dependent — what he describes as if-then signatures.

He invokes Todd Rose’s book The End of Average, Lisa Feldman Barrett’s line that “emotions are not, in principle, distinct from cognitions and perceptions,” and Annie Murphy Paul’s suggestion that “the body can be more rational than the brain.” He also challenges the old charioteer metaphor that elevates reason above passions, arguing that emotions, desires and bodily responses (he notes cortisol and adrenaline as examples) contribute valuable judgments.

Key Topics

Science, Neuroscience, David Brooks, Luiz Pessoa, Lisa Feldman Barrett, Todd Rose