And you do that by measuring the relative activation of the left prefrontal cortex in the fMRI, versus the right prefrontal cortex.

And so as the sensory input comes in and feeds from the old brain, it also goes up into the neocortex. And the neocortex is just memorizing.

So the outer part of that brain is the neocortex.

Where is it inside the neocortex?

There is the brain stem in between the cerebral cortex and the spinal cord.

Neocortex means new layer. It is a new layer on top of your brain.

Cortisol floods the brain it destroys hippocampal cells and memory, and can lead to all kinds of health problems.

It's all about cortical processing and forebrain specialization.

But the real big step was the neocortex.

But there are about a million of them.

And the brain started to fold in on itself, and that's why the neocortex is so highly convoluted.

In fact, the neocortex in the human brain is evolving at an enormous speed.

And on top of it, we have this memory system called the neocortex.

You're flying through the cortex of my colleague's brain.

It's the pinnacle, it's the final product that the universe has produced.

And I'm going to represent the neocortex here, by this box that's sticking on top of the old brain.

There is about 20 regions of the brain that have been modeled, simulated and tested the auditory cortex, regions of the visual cortex cerebellum, where we do our skill formation slices of the cerebral cortex, where we do our rational thinking.

First thing that happened in evolution with mammals, we started to develop a thing called the neocortex.

That's always been the case. And so all we can say, well, my neocortex, which is the part of the brain I'm interested in, has 30 billion cells.

The arrows indicate peak gray matter volume in prefrontal cortex. You can see that that peak happens a couple of years later in boys relative to girls, and that's probably because boys go through puberty a couple of years later than girls on average, and then during adolescence, there's a significant decline in gray matter volume in prefrontal cortex.

You cannot have a conscious mind if you don't have the interaction between cerebral cortex and brain stem.

As a result, the quality of textiles and of hides and skins had improved significantly and a large number of jobs had been created.

But, you know what? It's very, very regular.

Does it have the substance to do it?

It copied the posterior part, the back part, which is sensory, and put it in the front part.

Prefrontal cortex is an interesting brain area.

The reptilian part of our brain, which sits in the center of our brain, when it's threatened, it shuts down everything else, it shuts down the prefrontal cortex, the parts which learn, it shuts all of that down.

By definition, two people picked at random can't have correlations in the distribution of gray matter in the cortex.

Basically the homunculus is the visualization of a human being where each part of the body is proportional to the surface it takes in the brain.

And then, what I'm saying is, is that the eternal prediction is the output in the neocortex.

Our newest brain, our Homo sapien brain, our neocortex, corresponds with the what level.

And I strongly disagree with the idea that consciousness should be considered as the great product of the cerebral cortex.

It takes a central cortex, if you like, to be able to orchestrate all those elements at the same time.

There literally are only a handful of equations that you need to simulate the activity of the neocortex.

An FM device in the cortex of the brain, the motor cortex, will send signals in real time to the motor points in the relevant muscles so that the person will be able to move their arm, let's say, in real time, if they've lost control of their arm.

In humans, we actually developed the front part of the neocortex called the anterior part of the neocortex. And nature did a little trick.

You can see that the skin pore structure changes enormously from stretched skin pores to the regular skin texture.

The wiring from your sensory apparatus to those bits is shorter than the bits that have to pass through the thinky bit, the cortex.

You can also see that his visual cortex is activated in the back of the head, because that's where he's seeing, he's seeing his own brain.

This big cortex, or whatever, we're pretty proud of ourselves.

So, what we did was, for the past 15 years, was to dissect out the neocortex, systematically.

And you can see huge areas of cortex where there are massive correlations in the distribution of gray matter.

Cortical Surface Reconstruction and Visualization

So you can think of the neocortex actually as a massive grand piano, a million key grand piano.

These were people with brains of essentially the same design that eventually did discover all those things.