[Anotheroneagain]

Birds use their optic tectums to process visual inputs, but that likely doesn't enable much more than visual recognition. The mammal brain goes far far far further than that:

It is the nature of most real life signals that they are sparse when represented in certain domains, and what the neocortex does is that it finds these sparse domains, which has at least three consequences:.

1. Simplicity. As mammal thinking doesn't deal with the world directly, but only through this latent space of sparse data, it only needs to deal with the meaningful values. This results in great simplicity, and allows previously overwhelming problems becoming manageable, then simple, and later trivial, as the neocirtex succesfully finds their sparse representation.

2. The representation in which the signal is sparse is its theory. By engaging only with the meaningful values, a mammal's thinking and creativity gets restricted to what can be relresented with those meaningful values, and so gets restricred to what is real, or realistic. Unlike the schizophrenic, which comes up with completely random nonsense that he needs to test with the scientific method, healthy people can't even conceive the theory that he's testing, as it cannot be represented within the values that they use.

Healthy people thus have very little need for science, as their brains do all the science they need in their daily lives.

The third one is reconstruction. This is what in its most extreme for allowed for various seers, oracles, visions and premonitions, and other such things, and what is already used in practice in MRA machines, once its nature is known, its sparse representation can be used to reconstruct a shockingly clear and accurate picture from seemingly hopelessly inadequate data.