As a side note…
To anyone new to this community reading this thread… this term “crazy quilting” is just something we’ve been using here on HTM forum to refer to the strange ways evolution has found to project things onto cortical substrate. You’ll find no reference to “crazy quilts” or quilts of any kind in the mentioned neuroscience papers or in neuroscience jargon.
Re: #3 above, yeah exactly. This is one reason the “1000 Brains Theory” is appealing. It explains why continuous topology is unnecessary (even if local topologies are still obviously important). Hierarchies still emerge, but higher regions sample the same input as lower regions, but with different sampling properties. Models at every level are proposing an object or a collection of features as output to higher levels.
I think the “crazy quilting” effect on sensory before it gets to cortex is a way to normalize the data and present it to large swaths of cortical tissue so larger patterns can be discerned. It could be seen similar to the way one neuron’s RF is somewhat a random portion of its potential input.
Now we have to talk about what vs where, don’t we? We don’t have an answer to this problem, but my instinct is that there are two primary reference frames represented in cortical columns, one for allocentric representation of objects (the universe of space in your brain), and the other for egocentric representation of self within the current environment.
I think – and this totally speculative and uninformed – that the what and where pathways might also have this “crazy quilting” pattern across the entire cortex. I have not talked to the research team about this, mind you. But what reminded me of it was that there are borders between “slabs” of the crazy quilt… and sometimes the borders are not sharp, and there is some continuous gradient between the two parts. And I wonder if this could interface between what and where slabs…
Wouldn’t this just be one level up the hierarchy from the individual senses?
It does not make sense to me that the hub is localized to one place in the cortical sheet. From what I understood the hex-grid code was formed all over cortex?