For Gerald Edelman, reentry is the unique feature of higher brains. It is an ongoing recursive, and massively parallel process of signalling back and forth along reciprocal connections in the brain which integrates the various functionally segregated properties of brain areas despite the lack of a central coordinative area. One striking consequence of reentry is the widespread synchronization of activity of different groups of active neurons. Edelman compares the interconnections of functional clusters in the brain to a network of coupled springs, which propagate any perturbation throughout the system.
This is the essential contemporary image: the rhizome, the network -- Empire.