From this study, it appears that there is a common pattern of connectivity and clustering in mammalian brains. When looking at the layering of mammal brains: paleo, archicortex, and neo cortexes you can get a picture of what other animals may experience. For instance, the temporal immersive experience humans have is due to the hippocampus, it literally takes snaps shots of a wide array of neural activity where the system can differentiate the occurrences of events. That, and the limbic system that processes emotional states to make decisions of an anticipated outcome or experienced event. This means that the experience of being in the now but feeling that flow of events fading into the past and the anticipation of future events isn't just human since the architectural structures that perform those functions are in other animals as well. This study furthers that assertion by validating that not only is the layered structure of the brains of mammals identical but how they cluster and wire are identical as well. Imagine not having the symbolic abilities of a human and just feeling the notions that you can feel that represent complex scenarios and relationships. I don't know how many times I've gotten an idea and it's just a feeling that I know I can translate into words, but I don't have to.
This study insinuates that human intelligence is derived from animal intelligence. But this goes even further because avian brains are architecturally different and so are octopi where avians and octopi do have the ability to empathize and avians at least, have a similar brain structure that performs an identical process to the hippocampus in mammalian brains. Because these different brain architectures exhibit identical types of processing there can be logically equivalent processes to affect the same effect. This is subtle and implies that because neurons are state machines the human experience of that temporal immersion could be experienced by an AI!
While the mammalian brain is far more complex than any AI system to date, that doesn't mean optimization could not allow for a similar sophistication. I mean look at fractals in nature, look at how complex and time-consuming the processes are to effect a fractal rendering. Fractals in landscapes can take centuries, or millennials if not millions of years, with a decent GPU complex fractal structures of landscapes take milliseconds. So the potential to find optimized solutions to what biology has mastered is possible...
