The brain exhibits a remarkable ability to learn and execute context-appropriate behaviors. How it achieves such flexibility, without sacrificing learning efficiency, is an important open question. Neuroscience, psychology, and engineering suggest that reusing and repurposing computations are part of the answer. Here, we review evidence that thalamocortical architectures may have evolved to facilitate these objectives of flexibility and efficiency by coordinating distributed computations. Recent work suggests that distributed prefrontal cortical networks compute with flexible codes, whereas thalamus regularizes them to promote efficient reuse. Thalamocortical interactions resemble hierarchical Bayesian computations, and both observations can be related to existing gating, synchronization, and hub theories of thalamic function. Reviewing and synthesizing these points highlights key research horizons integrating computation, cognition, and systems neuroscience.
