Hobart and William Smith Colleges

11 November 2026 • Faculty • Research Graham Advances a New Way of Thinking About the Brain

In a review for The Transmitter, Professor Daniel Graham explores research that closely aligns with his own work on information flow in brain networks.

Professor of Psychological Science Daniel Graham explores the emerging understanding of how information moves through the brain in a review published Nov. 10 by The Transmitter, an online neuroscience news publication.

Graham reviews Brain Flows: How Network Dynamics Compose the Human Mind, a book by neuroscientist Michael Cole, a professor at Rutgers University and a leading researcher in brain imaging. Published by Princeton University Press, the book introduces a wider audience to the idea that the brain operates through dynamic flows of signals, integrating information across interconnected regions and systems to produce thought and behavior.

In his review, Graham praises Cole’s compelling case for understanding the brain not simply as a device that performs individual computations, but as a sophisticated system that routes information and adapts continuously to changing demands. He also considers how Cole’s work connects with a broader body of research, including theoretical and computational approaches that examine how signals move through brain networks.

“Cole’s book makes a compelling case for why brain flows matter,” Graham writes, expressing hope that it will help shape future neuroscience research and shift public understanding of the brain “as a computer to the brain as flow.”

The review reflects themes central to Graham’s own scholarship. While Cole has primarily investigated brain flows through brain imaging, Graham approaches similar questions through computational models and simulations, examining how information moves across interconnected neural networks.

Graham previously contributed an article to The Transmitter titled “It’s Time to Examine Neural Coding from the Message’s Point of View.” In it, he argues that neuroscience can gain new insights by shifting its perspective from individual neurons to the messages traveling across brain networks. Rather than focusing exclusively on the activity of individual neurons, he encourages researchers to consider how information is transmitted and processed throughout the brain.

Graham is the author of An Internet in Your Head: A New Paradigm for How the Brain Works, published by Columbia University Press in 2021. The book proposes that understanding the brain’s fundamental operations can be advanced by comparing them to the workings of the internet, with interconnected networks routing and transmitting information. He also writes a blog for Psychology Today exploring this perspective.

His research, largely performed in collaboration with Associate Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science Yan Hao, investigates human and mammalian brains through computational, behavioral and theoretical approaches, with a particular focus on visual coding.

Graham holds a Ph.D. in psychology and an M.S. in physics from Cornell University and a B.A. in physics from Middlebury College.