Hey, in the video titled ‘2025/02 - Cortical Circuit Overview,’ at around 12:20, Jeff mentions, ‘I have a theory about minicoms. I’ve never really shared it completely with everybody. We can get into that later, but I’m developing a partial understanding of how and what I think a minicolumn can do.’ Here’s a clip of that moment: https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxtnR0UhNicB6Fw5dyIUvj8ZYRkiAbbP1-?si=rxGzOkRw40SQoY6z. Could you elaborate on this theory he’s working on about minicolumns?
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Hi @James, we’ve moved up the release of a brainstorming video from last year that should address this question, its roughly three hours of content so we’ll be releasing them as part 1, 2, 3. Stay tuned!
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Part 1 is now up on youtube - 2024/07 - Minicolumns and Drift
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Hi @James , welcome to the forums, and thanks for your question. Just to add some context to the above video - a classic description of minicolumns might be something like “cells in any vertical cluster that share the same tuning for any given receptive field attribute” (Horton and Adams, 2005). Typically this is treated as a single tuning across all the cortical layers, like responsiveness to a particular orientation of an edge. However, Jeff has discussed at various times a theory about how the concept extends to other types of responsiveness that might be under-appreciated, like certain layers of a minicolumn detecting movement in particular directions, which complements (without being the same as) the minicolumn’s tuning to static features. This is the focus of some of the brainstorming that takes place in the video @brainwaves shared, but as Jeff himself said, he’s never fully described all his ideas around this. Hope that’s helpful, let us know if we can clarify anything else.
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