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Question - do you see any potential that horizontal versus vertical (with respect to system, not just euclidian space) has to do with cognitive stacking ? For example, is it low level feature detectors in initial visual processing that cause us to jump because they fire a 'snake' stimuli and then higher levels of the cognitive stack catch up and fire 'sorry, my bad' ?

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Maybe. I don't know as much about cortical layer differences, but stuff like you describe (fast threat processing) tends to use different, faster pathways through the brain.

Intuitively, this makes sense, because the connection time between two different layers in the same brain tissue is miniscule, but the connection time between different brain regions is much larger, and is therefore likely to dominate overall response time.

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