How Does the Cortex Compute?

Gary Marcus, Adam Marblestone, and Thomas Dean have an opinion piece in Science this week challenging the notion of the “canonical cortical circuit”.  They have a longer and open version here.  Their claim is that the cortex is probably doing a variety of different computations, which they list in their longer paper.  The piece has prompted responses by a number of people including Terry Sejnowski and Stephen Grossberg on the connectionist listserv (Check the November archive here).