How the brain controls its own blood flow

Blood vessels in the brain are highly interconnected and efficient in actively regulating blood flow. Yet, the mechanisms that regulate flow are not well studied on a holistic level. To determine how the brain can reliably control such a seemingly complicated network, UC San Diego Professor of Physics David Kleinfeld and Postdoctoral Scholar Ji Xiang formulated a mathematical model that uses the measured connections among vessels to predict the impact of a change in a single vessel on the flow through all the other vessels.