@barnettjv I started out thinking about convergence much like you are describing - that somehow things come together somewhere “higher” in the brain. This is what much of the literature suggests and it is somewhat how most complex systems are configured by humans. Humans are the viewer of the information and pre-processing and consolidating to make the human more efficient just makes sense.
This begs the question - what looks at this higher-level information in the brain?
Also - if the is some sort of funnel does that end up making a weak spot in the brain?
After much reading and reflecting the realization set in that it is possible to retain a distributed representation through the pathways through the cortex. What forms in the lobe hubs is a distributed representation!
Once you make that mental shift it frees you to think of cortical processing in new ways.
What can you add to a stream by micro-parsing the features in each stream?
What happens when you compare these micro-parsed streams against each other?
Micro-parsing?
Sure!
In computer programs we take streams of tokens (letters) in groups (words/numbers) and parse these into useful semantics. The quanta are very coarse grained.
The brain starts with a much finer grained representation distributed over both time and space.
There are at least 4 stages of parsing between V1 and the first association hub.
This parsing is through at least two streams (WHAT & WHERE) and there is good reason to think there is a third stream.
To make thing more interesting, this parsing is both bottom up and top down.
It took me a long time to wrap my head around this way of looking at things but it does such a better job of explaining what I read in the literature that I can’t see things a different way now.