An interesting hypothesis of neocortical function is explained here: Predictive coding in the visual cortex: a functional interpretation of some extra-classical receptive-field effects

We describe a model of visual processing in which feedback connections from a higher- to a lowerorder visual cortical area carry predictions of lower-level neural activities, whereas the feedforward connections carry the residual errors between the predictions and the actual lower-level activities.

This is in line with those two papers:

And this is somewhat in line with this:

HTM cells have three output states, active from feed-forward input, active from lateral input (which represents a prediction), and inactive. The first output state corresponds to a short burst of action potentials in a neuron. The second output state corresponds to a slower, steady rate of action potentials in a neuron