Your brain is an expensive organ

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Chapter 4 endnote 14, from How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett.
Some context is:

In brain-imaging experiments, when we show photographs to test subjects or ask them to perform tasks, only a small portion of the signal we measure is due to the photos and tasks; most of the signal represents intrinsic activity. [...] This intrinsic activity is metabolically expensive;

Your brain is your most expensive organ—it consumes about 20% of your body’s budget—and the biggest consumer is intrinsic neural activity.[1] There is a limit on how many connections your brain can support metabolically and still run. It must transfer information efficiently by passing activity to the fewest number of neurons possible.

Notes on the Notes

  1. Raichle, Marcus E. 2010. “Two Views of Brain Function.” Trends in Cognitive Science 14 (4): 180–190.