[georgewfraser]

There is a much bigger problem with basing your model of the brain on cortical columns, which is that they don't exist outside visual cortex and the whisker region of sensory cortex in rats and mice. The idea of a repeating functional unit was so appealing that many neuroscientists have just refused to give it up, in a kind of collective wishful thinking. There was an excellent review paper in 2005, "The cortical column: a structure without a function", which is basically the emperor-has-no-clothes of this field.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1569491/

[closetnerd]

Yup, read that a while back actually. And it makes some good points. It should be titled "The cortical column: a structure without an agreed upon function".

The cortical column are a lot more well define, referred to as ocular dominance columns, in the visual cortex. The problem is that the structure of cortical columns are very malleable and plastic. So it makes it very difficult to see them consistently throughout the neocortex. So there isn't much definitive proof for cortical columns throughout the neocortex but there is convincing theory, very much pushed by Hawkins.

There is a large consensus that the neocortex stores and acts on information in a distributed way. Most of the well defined theories propose some kinds of neural engrams. But there wasn't any theory about how the neocortex stored information in a distributed way. The function of neocortical columns, as proposed by Rinkus, seems to explain very convincing one such way of creating Sparse Distributed Representations.

In terms of theory, my opinion is that cortical columns seem to be integral to a unifying theory of the neocortex.