Subcortical Areas

• Notice how the cortex has connections with the Thalmus, the brainstem and other subcortical areas.
• A lot of simulation talks about the cortex, but it is clear that it has to have a lot of interaction with other areas.
• Note that the brain is built up (evolutionarily) from relatively simple structures, and then new areas are added with the cortex being last.
• So, the cortex depends on those other areas.
• A lot of work has discussed the Basal Ganglia (I think largely because it has some explanatory power for production systems).
• The Striatum is frequently discussed because of emotion.
• These subcortical areas are of immense importance, and have different neural type distributions.
• One researcher (Rick Granger) focuses on cortical subcortical loops (Engines of the brain: The computational instruction set of human cognition 2005).