The Brain Blueprints Project

Introduction

Trying to understand and recreate the brain and cognition has been a long-term interest of mine, but I must admit it is a daunting task. You can take a functional, evolutionary, and anatomical approach, but it’s easy to get bogged down in details and tangents. I’m not saying these aren’t needed or foundational, it’s just that what I’m after and haven’t been able to find is a bird’s-eye view, an accessible system of systems of the brain and cognition, if you will. So, this is part of my latest attempt.

THE AI CONNECTION:

The pure biological emulation approach appears to be losing ground in 
the AI battle in 2023, so why pursue this difficult reductionist approach?

It's still unclear if AGI and sentience/consciousness can be supported 
by current ML/NN frameworks, but as they first started by emulating 
biological NN (e.g., the perceptron), it serves as both insurance and 
an alternative.

The goal is to flesh out subsystems and functions to a certain level 
of detail—not too little, not too much—before joining them all in one 
final map for emulation. As mentioned, it's a herculean task, 
for which better maps can be helpful.

Where to start? As vision is a well-known system, it’s as good a place as any to begin figuring things out. Here’s a bird’s-eye view of the areas, functions, and major connections that constitute part of the aforementioned map.

The system view should hopefully be self-explanatory to some extent. 
In this case, we can summarize that there are several distinct brain areas 
that specialize in extracting specific features from the environment. 
Some build on preceding ones and others run parallel. 

The PFC or Prefrontal Cortex needs some extra explanation as it serves
at least the dual role of receiving information for action:

"I saw a bear, what next !?"

And modulation or attending to a certain feature(s):

"Was it really a bear, let me focus..." 

Neuroanatomy

While not strictly necessary for emulation or even understanding, anatomical representations can be helpful in grounding things in reality and providing additional insights: