Seeking topologists interested in the brain.

I don't have a specific question, but I imagine interesting ideas may spring from a conversation.

From Paul Cisek's paper on viewing behavior through a phylogenetic lens.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13414-019-01760-1

"The neural activity in the circuit responding to that affordance is not a representation of a thing in the world; it is the specification of an action to take within the world."

Tempting to conclude that 'smell-following' is the ancestor of 'higher thought'.

But "thought" is not the right word. We need a short term for perception-action-loop. Suggestions?

I love information-dense but globally coherent figures like this. If you want to represent flows, don't use arrows with right angle turns!

Also: Luis Puelles developmental work should be widely celebrated.

This is super cool, and might fit with Friedrich Sanides's idea about the dual origin of the cortex: the parahippocampal and paraolfactory moeities.

Sanides is really hard to parse, but this review from my labmates is a good starting point: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6500485/

There is something epic about the evolutionary way of thinking, in the Mahabharata/Odyssey sense.

Our step away from reality into the world of cortical 'fantasy' might have begun with an ancient noctural interlude.

(Wild speculation alert.)

The mammalian brain. Interesting how the amygdala seems to be a kind of fusion zone.