Neocortex Topics

• spinal cord neurons
• cerebral hemispheres
• parts of the limbic system
• sensory stimulus
• pyramidal neurons
• motor cortex
• cerebral cortex
• sensory perception
• working memory
• occipital lobe
• spatial reasoning
• functional units
• synaptic connections
• axons
• cognitive skills
• brainstem
• upper layers
• functional areas
• primates

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Neocortex, Neocortex

It is the outer layer of the cerebral hemispheres, and made up of six layers, labelled I to VI (with VI being the innermost and I being the outermost). The neocortex is part of the cerebral cortex (along with the archicortex and paleocortex, which are cortical parts of the limbic system). It is involved in higher functions such as sensory perception, generation of motor commands, spatial reasoning, conscious thought and, in humans, language. Other names for the neocortex include neopallium ("new mantel") and isocortex ("equal rind").

These folds increase the surface area of the neocortex considerably without taking up too much more volume. This has allowed primates and especially humans to evolve new functional areas of neocortex that are responsible for enhanced cognitive skills such as working memory, speech, and language.

However, there are many exceptions to this uniformity; for example, the motor cortex lacks layer IV. There is some canonical circuitry within the cortex; for example, pyramidal neurons in the upper layers II and III project their axons to other areas of neocortex, while those in the deeper layers V and VI project primarily out of the cortex, e.g. to the thalamus, brainstem, and spinal cord. Neurons in layer IV receive all of the synaptic connections from outside the cortex (mostly from thalamus), and themselves make short-range, local connections to other cortical layers. Thus, layer IV receives all incoming sensory information and distributes it to the other layers for further processing.

These are patches of the neocortex with a diameter of about 0.5 mm (and a depth of 2 mm). Each column typically responds to a sensory stimulus representing a certain body part or region of sound or vision. These columns are similar, and can be thought of as the basic repeating functional units of the neocortex. In humans, the neocortex consists of about a half-million of these columns, each of which contains approximately 60,000 neurons.

For example, the occipital lobe contains the primary visual cortex, and the temporal lobe contains the primary auditory cortex. Further subdivisions or areas of neocortex are responsible for more specific cognitive processes. In humans, the frontal lobe contains areas devoted to abilities that are enhanced in or unique to our species, such as complex language processing localized to the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (Broca's area) and social and emotional processing localized to the orbitofrontal cortex.

The cellular organization of the allocortex is different from the six-layer structure mentioned above. In humans, 90% of the cerebral cortex is neocortex.

A high neocortex ratio is thought to correlate with a number of social variables such as group size and the complexity of social mating behaviors.

Source: Wikipedia > Neocortex