Cortical column

[3] The evolutionary benefit to this duplication allowed human neocortex to increase in size by almost 3-fold over just the last 3 million years.

[3] The columnar hypothesis states that the cortex is composed of discrete, modular columns of neurons, characterized by a consistent connectivity profile.

[5] The columnar organization hypothesis is currently the most widely adopted to explain the cortical processing of information.

An important distinction is that the columnar organization is functional by definition, and reflects the local connectivity of the cerebral cortex.

David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel followed up on Mountcastle's discoveries in the somatic sensory cortex with their own studies in vision.

[21] The authors propose a uniform neocortex, and choose a fixed width and length to calculate the cell numbers.