Seems to me (but I am not an expert) that most of the brain functionality is not like this. Especially the parts related to thinking. Thinking is usually slow and needs to be learned -- which is the exact opposite of how the massively parallelized parts work.

I'm not an expert either, but from what I've read on the subject, most of the neocortex does work like this. The architecture used in the visual cortex is largely the same as that used in the rest of the cortex, with some minor variations. This is suggested by the fact that people who lose an area of their neocortex are often able to recover, with another area filling in for it. I'm on a phone, so I can't go into as much detail as I'd like, but I recommend investigating the work of Mountcastle, and more recently Markram.

Edit: On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins explains this principle in more depth, it's an interesting read.