  It is widely believed that the particular wiring observed within cortical
columns boosts neural computation. We use rewiring of neural networks
performing real-world cognitive tasks to study the validity of this argument.
In a vast survey of wirings within the column we detect, however, no traces of
the proposed effect. It is on the mesoscopic inter-columnar scale that the
existence of columns - largely irrespective of their inner organization -
enhances the speed of information transfer and minimizes the total wiring
length required to bind the distributed columnar computations towards
spatio-temporally coherent results.
