Structure to the human brain, scale-free and otherwise

From the Blue Brain Project's page on the Neocortical Column (NCC):

The Neocortical Column (NCC) marks the quantum leap from reptiles to mammals and therefore constitutes the birth of mammalian intelligence and the emergence of human cognitive capabilities. The neocortex is the brain region that allows mammals to adapt so efficiently to a rapidly changing world.
The NCC is considered to be the smallest network of neurons that act as a functional unit exhibiting some of the most complex functions of the brain - the NCC is the elementary building block of the mammalian brain.
The NCC was such a highly successful circuit design, that it was repeatedly duplicated to become almost 80% of the human brain (millions of columns were added). In humans, the duplication continued at such a pace that the neocortex started folding in on itself to make more space for newly added columns, thus forming the highly convoluted human brain. (see The Brain: Our Universe Within).

It seems the ultimate ambition is for NCC function to be abstracted away, with the resulting simulation of human neural structure assembled in a scale-free manner. Cf. the abstract of a relatively recent paper titled "Scale-free brain functional networks":

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is used to extract functional networks connecting correlated human brain sites. Analysis of the resulting networks in different tasks shows that: (a) the distribution of functional connections, and the probability of finding a link vs. distance are both scale-free, (b) the characteristic path length is small and comparable with those of equivalent random networks, and (c) the clustering coefficient is orders of magnitude larger than those of equivalent random networks. All these properties, typical of scale-free small world networks, reflect important functional information about brain states.