While auto-association captures some principles of how pattern recognition works in the cortex, clearly even the cortex of fish is doing something far more sophisticated. Some theorize that the vertebrate brain’s ability to solve the invariance problem derives not from the unique cortical structures in mammals, but from the complex interactions between the cortex and the thalamus, interactions that have been present since the first vertebrates. Perhaps the thalamus—a ball-shaped structure at the center of the brain—operates like a three-dimensional blackboard, with the cortex providing initial
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