There is strong evidence that the neocortex works on a common algorithm; vision, hearing, touch, language, behavior, and most everything else the neocortex does are manifestations of a single algorithm applied to different modalities of sensory input.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_temporal_memory http://onintelligence.org/ http://www.numenta.com/Numenta_HTM_Concepts.pdf