I think that this view has been around longer than 2003. Steven Pinker describes how integrated as well as parallel thought is in his book The Blank Slate, whic

I think that this view has been around longer than 2003. Steven Pinker describes how integrated as well as parallel thought is in his book The Blank Slate, which came out in 2002 (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blank_Slate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blank_Slate). Assuming that he took 2-4 years writing it. He must have been working on it in the 1990s. This is an important thing as it isn't an assumption anymore. This idea of a complex and rich network of networks is now starting to be seen in computer simulations of actual neural networks. The best bit is that people can do deeper experimentation based upon those two facets like the blue brain project. Although, a lot of questions remain unanswered. A good starting part, I think, would be to see how information itself is transferred and stored at the 'nodes' of the network. For example, recently Dr. Thomas Sudhof (see: http://neuroscience.stanford.edu/research/laboratories/SudhofLab.html http://neuroscience.stanford.edu/research/laboratories/Sudho...) from Stanford won a prize because he decoded the protein that causes synaptic exchange to happen (see: http://med.stanford.edu/ism/2010/june/sudhof-0603.html http://med.stanford.edu/ism/2010/june/sudhof-0603.html). That's just one piece, but it's a crucial piece. What I love about the current state of neuro-science is that it's like a scattered jigsaw puzzle waiting to be put together. Almost every month / week (?) some small, but crucial piece is found and it gets added to the box. It's simply beautiful. Another really interesting thing is that everything that's usually here on HN from map reduce to manipulating huge amounts of data is laying the foundation for creating tools that tackle this problem. It's like everybody is inadvertently working to complete the jigsaw without realizing it, which is really, really mind blowing.