Further insights into the interareal connectivity of a cortical network

Over the past years, network science has proven invaluable as a means to better understand many of the processes taking place in the brain. Recently, interareal connectivity data of the macaque cortex was made available with great richness of detail. We explore new aspects of this dataset, such as a correlation between connection weights and cortical hierarchy. We also look at the link-community structure that emerges from the data to uncover the major communication pathways in the network, and moreover investigate its reciprocal connections, showing that they share similar properties. A question arising from these analyses is that of determining the role of weak connections in the unfolding of cortical processes. Though we leave this question largely unanswered, we have found that weak connections pervade the entire cortex while giving rise to no community-like structure. We conjecture that whatever function they come to be found to perform will likely involve some form of cortex-wide communication or control.