Despite considerable effort over a century and the benefit of remarkable technical advances in the past few decades, we are still far from understanding mammalian cerebral neocortex. With its six layers, modular architecture, canonical circuits, innumerable cell types, and computational complexity, isocortex remains a challenging mystery. In this review, we argue that identifying the structural and functional similarities between mammalian piriform cortex and reptilian dorsal cortex could help reveal common organizational and computational principles and by extension, some of the most primordial computations carried out in cortical networks.
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