In a highly connected world, modern distributed systems deal with uncertain scenarios, where environments, infrastructures, and applications are widely diverse. In the scope of IoT-Edge-Fog-Cloud computing (i.e., the distributed compute continuum), leveraging neuroscience-inspired principles and mechanisms could aid in building more flexible solutions able to generalize over different environments. In this talk we discuss our recent findings and show that highly connected information- and communications systems constitute learning self-adaptive ecosystems.