General Cortex

Understanding how cortex evolved is seeming like a problem that needs more attention. The story that I imagine is that there must have been a time when there was a "general cortex". This piece of tissue perhaps arose out of a nucleus that was designed for detecting the molecules around early organisms (i.e. smelling). But somehow, the tissue got adapted quickly for other tasks. Cortex got spread around to serve other purposes.

If that is true, that cortex was suddenly spread from one modality to all (suddenly being on evolutionary terms), then take into consideration that the type of information coming from these modalities were greatly different. I mean we're talking about most of cognitive function. The cortex was spread out to start handling all of these functions, taking in different forms of information and organizing them in a useful way.

There was a period of general cortex, where it processed any kind of sensory modality, motor system, cognitive control or any other type of information. Evolution began wiring it up in more complex ways, adding more cells to make it more powerful. The structures started to organize so that more cells could be packed in to the same volume. The connections being most of the volume were scaled back such that only the areas that needed to communicate were available. As evolution raged on, the areas specialized for their functions, learning new tricks to process more and more information.

What general cortex means is that the type of information that we could process may not be limited to naturalistic information. Naturalistic information has a very complex and interesting structure, but it has a particular structure. There are other types of information that likely have structure, but of a different kind than perhaps nature. Can general cortex make sense of all kinds of information structures? So long as there is a signal, cortex will find it?

Perhaps there truly is a similarity between auditory and visual information that our brain receives. In essence you truly are receiving the pixel information coming from the outside world -- this is basically why pixels work. There is a deeper meaning to this information that your brain parses out, but we can control the pixels on a computer screen. I could show you anything in pixel space. Any type of information, even just noise. Would we ever say that your brain was incapable of not seeing anything that we could show it? The brain certainly can be shown illusions, but it still perceives something.

Building a machine that could perceive any type of information as cortex perceives the world is an interesting possibility of general cortex. It is so effortless for our brains to perceive the world, even though this is a remarkably complex and intense operation. We can find ways to manipulate the information that we perceive that we have built this amazing society. Our visual systems were designed to process a three-dimensional world over the course of evolution, but if there was a general cortex, and say the world had been 4-dimensional instead of three, would it be impossible for evolution to come up with cortex that could see in 4-dimensions? Can we find the patterns of how general cortex became neocortex to see how we could make it see it 4-dimensions? (Could we even train our own neocortex to see in 4D?)