What happens in layers 5a and 6a?

[Bitking]

@Casey

What are your thoughts on why the sensory input passes through the thalamus? Do you think it does something different from the CTC connection to L4?

1. The thalamus is an older structure; earlier this was all there was.

2. One of the properties that I mentioned has a prior post that goes into this in some depth, see numbered references # 4 though # 8, with a focus on #8 for my statement:

HTMs, Time Locking, and Neural Oscillation (Brain Waves)

The basic HTM theory describes region updates as synchronous, with the SDRs as a static presence during each cycle evaluation; updated whole throughout the region after each evaluation. It is implied in all discussions for predictive dendrite segments (SDRs) that there is a “before” and “after” in regards to global states for the local region; the processing of the SDR neurons in a region could be considered as the evolution of the current region state to the next state as a coherent whole. I d…

I have trouble pointing to a single reference on the attention thing. I have read a bunch of papers since the original “searchlight of attention” and most of them have refined this by patching up the missing or wrong bits. Of course - there are the counter argument papers that point out the problems without proposing any alternatives.

Numenta turns attention to The Thalamus!

The RAC/RAS has been postulated as the “Searchlight of Attention” since this paper by F. Crick: If you google the term “searchlight of attention” you can see that many papers since this one explore this concept (pro and con) and add considerable insight to the workings of this structure. It is certainly an important adjunct to the interplay between the Thalamus and Cortex - I am not sure if the attention function should be a stand-alone feature apart from the data path or an inseparably part …