Yes, this is roughly how it is believed to work. In fact, one can make out neurons that are reliably involved in representing concepts like location and orienta

Yes, this is roughly how it is believed to work. In fact, one can make out neurons that are reliably involved in representing concepts like location and orientation [1], places [2] and persons [3]. Usually, multiple neurons are involved in representing single concepts (population coding [4] and distributed representations [5]). Concepts are constructed by successively extracting features and combining simpler features in more complex ones, from the sensory input regions towards the association regions in the cortex (see feature hierarchies [6]). You can visualize thoughts as population-rate coded probability distributions that interact very quickly in single "torrents" of activations. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_cell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_cell [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Place_cell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Place_cell [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandmother_cell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandmother_cell [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_coding#Population_coding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_coding#Population_codin... [5]: http://psych.stanford.edu/~jlm/papers/PDP/Chapter3.pdf http://psych.stanford.edu/~jlm/papers/PDP/Chapter3.pdf [6]: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Neocognitron http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Neocognitron