What if the most widely used model of brain connectivity is too crude to capture what actually makes the cortex work? Neuroanatomist Henry Kennedy presents evidence that connection strength, not mere presence or absence of links, is where the real specificity of cortical architecture lies , spanning five orders of magnitude. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network podcast series. Henry Kennedy joins Paul Verschure and Tony Prescott at the BCBT summer school to present his quantitative tract-tracing data from the macaque monkey cortex, challenging the utility of small-world network models for understanding cortical organization. With a connection density of roughly 70 percent among 91 cortical areas, Kennedy argues that binary descriptions of connectivity tell you almost nothing , at that density, everything is virtually connected t ...