Why are the folds in the human brain important? What’s different about surface area vs sheer volume?
In: Biology
The neocortex (the wrinkly, outside part of the brain) is comprised of very many “cortical columns”. If you picture the neocortex flattened out like a napkin, the height of a column is the thickness of the napkin. So it seems that evolution wanted columns of a particular height, and the wrinkling was to increase the surface area of the napkin. In other words, humans evolved more columns rather than taller columns. From this you can infer that there’s something fundamental about a column as a processing unit, and columns like to exist in 2D arrays.
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