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Kayson Fakhar, Duncan E. Astle
(2026).
Embracing the suboptimal organization of the human brain.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
Elsevier BV.
- Publication date
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May 2026
- Identifier
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10.1016/j.tics.2026.04.008
- Authors
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Kayson Fakhar,
Duncan E. Astle
- Source
- Trends in Cognitive Sciences
- Reference type
- article
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Metadata source
- crossref
Abstract
Human brain architecture is guiding brain-inspired artificial intelligence (AI) and has been treated as an optimal template, whose deviations could mark different psychiatric and neurological conditions. We argue this premise is wrong: under any single goal (e.g., minimal wiring cost or maximal communication efficiency), the human connectome is suboptimal. Instead, its organization reflects multi-objective trade-offs navigated over evolution and development under biological and environmental constraints. For psychopathology, atypical trajectories are not distances from an ideal brain but reweighted compromises in the same trade-off space. For neuro-AI, directly duplicating the brain's connectivity risks copying its irrelevant compromises. Treating brains and models as products of multi-objective optimization and co-tuning relevant objectives offers a more powerful framework for interpreting clinical phenotypes and designing next-generation AI.
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