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My first question has to do with nervous system organization. We've talked about how the NS does not possess the sort of hierarchical system that we might imagine (no main director) but works by having a distributed system of closely associated parts that communicate equally with each other. In other words, neurons are grouped together in ways that allow for efficient means of communication. My question is, are these groupings constant throughout one's life or do they evolve over time? What is it that allows for the mind to develop? Is it the re-organization of neurons, the firing of new neurons, and/or the sequence of neuronal firing? Or something else entirely?

 My next question is how does this idea of coordination in the absence of a coordinator connect to human social habits and structure. Is it more "natural" for us to design a social system with a definite leader or not? How about our own desire to be leaders? Does the absence of a hierarchy within the brain somehow lead us to search for a hierarchy externally? Is our tendency to search for/create external hierarchy a downfall, a kind of unwillingness to realize that the most sophisticated systems (the brain, for example) do not operate in such a manner?