:There's a theory about how information spreads through cerebral cortex, in which one cortical column: mental image of a tightly woven collection of a hundred tiny objects, each a blob at the center of branching threads :starts firing in a pattern, and if another cortical column a certain distance from it also starts broadcasting the same pattern: mental image of two circles each centered on a column :where the two circles intersect, a third column hears two identical spike trains arriving in synchrony: mental image of the two circles intersecting on a third column, forming an equilateral triangle :and that third column picks up the pattern and starts broadcasting it itself, recruiting more columns at the same key distance and forming a synchronized computing network spanning an area of cortex.:  The image that goes along with this is a triangular grid.  :Did that - help make sense of it at all?:

:There's a theory about how information spreads through cerebral cortex, in which one cortical column: mental image of a tightly woven collection of a hundred tiny objects, each a blob at the center of branching threads :starts firing in a pattern, and if another cortical column a certain distance from it also starts broadcasting the same pattern: mental image of two circles each centered on a column :where the two circles intersect, a third column hears two identical spike trains arriving in synchrony: mental image of the two circles intersecting on a third column, forming an equilateral triangle :and that third column picks up the pattern and starts broadcasting it itself, recruiting more columns at the same key distance and forming a synchronized computing network spanning an area of cortex.:  The image that goes along with this is a triangular grid of columns, spanning a plane, all broadcasting in synchrony.  :Did that - help make sense of it at all?: