Neurons in the brain communicate by short electrical pulses, the so-called action potentials or spikes. How can we understand the process of spike generation? How can we understand information transmission by neurons? What happens if thousands of neurons are coupled together in a seemingly random network? How does the network connectivity determine the activity patterns?

The book is based round the concept of the network is not the great equaliser, an egalitarian construct that has, since the Internet became a powerful social force, begun to spread out into all works of life, with network-centric organisation. Instead, the authors state that the exploit ? a direct reference to the hacker term ? is a common corporate and subversive means of taking quiet control of the flow and direction of networks.