This view arises from what I understand about the “modular” nature of the human brain: we think we’re a single entity that is “flexible enough” to think about lots of different things, but in reality our brains consist of a whole bunch of highly specialized “modules”, each able to do some single specific thing.
The brain has many different components with specializations, but the largest and human dominant portion, the cortex, is not really specialized at all in the way you outline.
The cortex is no more specialized than your hard drive.
Its composed of a single repeating structure and associated learning algorithm that appears to be universal. The functional specializations that appear in the adult brain arise due to topological wiring proximity to the relevant sensory and motor connections. The V1 region is not hard-wired to perform mathematically optimal gabor-like edge filters. It automatically evolves into this configuration because it is the optimal configuration for modelling the input data at that layer, and it evolves thus soley based on exposure to said input data from retinal ganglion cells.
You can think of cortical tissue as a biological ‘neuronium’. It has a semi-magical emergent capacity to self-organize into an appropriate set of feature detectors based on what its wired to. more on this
All that being said, the inter-regional wiring itself is currently less understood and is probably more genetically predetermined.
The brain has many different components with specializations, but the largest and human dominant portion, the cortex, is not really specialized at all in the way you outline.
The cortex is no more specialized than your hard drive.
Its composed of a single repeating structure and associated learning algorithm that appears to be universal. The functional specializations that appear in the adult brain arise due to topological wiring proximity to the relevant sensory and motor connections. The V1 region is not hard-wired to perform mathematically optimal gabor-like edge filters. It automatically evolves into this configuration because it is the optimal configuration for modelling the input data at that layer, and it evolves thus soley based on exposure to said input data from retinal ganglion cells.
You can think of cortical tissue as a biological ‘neuronium’. It has a semi-magical emergent capacity to self-organize into an appropriate set of feature detectors based on what its wired to. more on this
All that being said, the inter-regional wiring itself is currently less understood and is probably more genetically predetermined.