The most significant role of the thalamus, however, is its continual communication with the neocortex. The pattern recognizers in the neocortex send tentative results to the thalamus and receive responses principally using both excitatory and inhibitory reciprocal signals from layer VI of each recognizer. Keep in mind that these are not wireless messages, so that there needs to be an extraordinary amount of actual wiring (in the form of axons) running between all regions of the neocortex and the thalamus. Consider the vast amount of real estate (in terms of the physical mass of connections
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