Neural circuit function redundancy in brain disorders

TL;DR

This paper reviews the concept of redundancy in neural circuits, its implications for understanding brain disorders, and proposes future research directions based on this property.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of neural circuit redundancy, introduces key concepts, and discusses its significance in brain disorder research and experimental design.

Findings

Redundancy is prevalent in healthy brains.

Redundancy influences interpretations of brain disorder data.

Future experiments should consider redundancy effects.

Abstract

Redundancy is a ubiquitous property of the nervous system. This means that vastly different configurations of cellular and synaptic components can enable the same neural circuit functions. However, until recently very little brain disorder research considered the implications of this characteristic when designing experiments or interpreting data. Here, we first summarise the evidence for redundancy in healthy brains, explaining redundancy and three of its sub-concepts: sloppiness, dependencies, and multiple solutions. We then lay out key implications for brain disorder research, covering recent examples of redundancy effects in experimental studies on psychiatric disorders. Finally, we give predictions for future experiments based on these concepts.