The emergence of a unified cognitive moment relies on the coordination of scattered mosaics of functionally specialized brain regions. Here we review the mechanisms of large-scale integration that counterbalance the distributed anatomical and functional organization of brain activity to enable the emergence of coherent behaviour and cognition.
Francisco Varela in Daniel J. Siegel The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape who We are, Guilford Press, 2012, p. 360.