H is for Hierarchy, but where is it?

[rhyolight]

I just ran across this post, which sums up our current thinking on hierarchy very well.

A Theory of How Columns in the Neocortex Enable Learning the Structure of the World

Our view of hierarchy has changed, somewhat. We now realize that individual regions are far more powerful than we previously thought. It doesn’t make sense to focus on hierarchy until we completely understand what regions do. For example, there are several different sources of both feedforward and feedback signals in the hierarchy. These originate and terminate in different cellular layers. We need to understand what type of information these layers represent to understand what we gain from a hi…