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"To me, sight, hearing, and touch seem very different. They have fundamentally different qualities. Sight involves color, texture, shape, depth, and form. Hearing has pitch, rhythm, and timbre. They feel very different. How can they be the same? Mountcastle says they aren’t the same, but the way the cortex processes signal from the ear is the same as the way it processes signal from the eyes. He goes on to say that motor control works on the same principle, too.
… If Mountcastle is correct, the algorithm of the cortex must be expressed independently of any particular function or sense. The brain uses the same process to see as to hear. The cortex does something universal the can be applied to any type of sensory or motor system.
When I first read Mountcastle’s paper I nearly fell out of my chair. Here was Rosetta stone of neuroscience — a single paper and a single idea that united all the diverse and wondrous capabilities of the human mind. It untied them under a single algorithm. In one step it exposed the fallacy of all previous attempts to understand and engineer human behavior as diverse capabilities. I hope you can appreciate how radical and wonderfully elegant Mountcastle’s proposal is. The best ideas in science are always simple, elegant, and unexpected, and this is one of the best. In my opinion it was, is and will likely remain the most important discovery in neuroscience. Incredibly, though, most scientists and engineers either refuse to believe it, choose to ignore it, or aren’t aware of it."
<On intelligence> Jeff Hawkins with Sandra Blakeslee
