Whose cortical column would that be?
- Institute of Neuroinformatics, University of Zurich and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
The cortical column has been an invaluable concept to explain the functional organization of the neocortex. While this idea was born out of experiments that cleverly combined electrophysiological recordings with anatomy, no one has ‘seen’ the anatomy of a column. All we know is that when we record through the cortex of primates, ungulates, and carnivores in a trajectory perpendicular to its surface there is a remarkable constancy in the receptive field properties of the neurons regarding one set of stimulus features. There is no obvious morphological analog for this functional architecture, in fact much of the anatomical data seems to challenge it. Here we describe historically the origins of the concept of the cortical column and the struggles of the pioneers to define the columnar architecture. We suggest that in the concept of a ‘canonical circuit’ we may find the means to reconcile the structure of neocortex with its functional architecture. The canonical microcircuit respects the known connectivity of the neocortex, and it is flexible enough to change transiently the architecture of its network in order to perform the required computations.
Keywords:
cortical column, Daisy, bouton cluster, neuroanatomy, canonical microcircuit
Citation:
da Costa NM and Martin KAC (2010) Whose cortical column would that be? Front. Neuroanat. 4:16. doi: 10.3389/fnana.2010.00016
Received: 15 December 2009;
Paper pending published: 21 February 2010;
Accepted: 08 April 2010;
Published online: 31 May 2010
Edited by:
Javier DeFelipe, Cajal Institute, Spain
Reviewed by:
Shaul Hestrin, Stanford University, USA
Kathleen S. Rockland, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
Copyright:
© 2010 da Costa and Martin. This is an open-access article subject to an exclusive license agreement between the authors and the Frontiers Research Foundation, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited.
*Correspondence:
Nuno Maçarico da Costa, Institute of Neuroinformatics, University of Zurich and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, Winterthurerstrasse 190, 8057 Zurich, Switzerland. e-mail: ndacosta@ini.phys.ethz.ch;
Kevan A. C. Martin, Institute of Neuroinformatics, University of Zurich and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, Winterthurerstrasse 190, 8057 Zurich, Switzerland. e-mail: kevan@ini.phys.ethz.ch