A new way of mapping activity and connections between different regions of the brain has revealed fresh insights into how higher order functions like language, thought and attention, are organized.

Functional programming supports higher-order functions and first-order functions. Higher-order functions take other functions as arguments or return functions as results.

Techniques such as currying and memoization can both be expressed as higher-order functions. Aspect-oriented programming can also be achieved in JavaScript using higher-order functions.