Only mammals have a neocortex. But we know from behaviour that
birds and reptiles think a lot like mammals. They must have
structures and processes similarly to a neocortex. ScienceDaily
has a report (here) on research by Dugas-Ford and others in a
PNAS paper, Cell-type homologies and the origins of the
neocortex. The group looked for neurons similar to those in the
neocortex in birds. This supports a 50 year old hypothesis. Both
the mammalian neocortex and a structure in the bird brain called
the dorsal ventricular ridge (DVR) originate from an embryonic
region called the telencephalon. But the two regions mature into
very different shapes, with the neocortex made up of six
distinct cortical layers while the DVR contains large clusters
of neurons called nuclei. … in the 1960s, neuroscientist Harvey
Karten studied the neural inputs and outputs of the DVR, finding
that they were remarkably similar to the pathways traveling to
and from the neocortex in mammals. As a result, he proposed that
the DVR performs a s