How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed

by Ray Kurzweil

As I will discuss below, our procedures and actions also comprise patterns and are likewise stored in regions of the cortex, so my estimate of the total capacity of the human neocortex is on the order of low hundreds of millions of patterns. This rough tally correlates well with the number of pattern recognizers that I estimated above at about 300 million, so it is a reasonable conclusion that the function of each neocortical pattern recognizer is to process one iteration (that is, one copy among the multiple redundant copies of most patterns in the neocortex) of a pattern. Our estimates of the number of patterns that a human brain is capable of dealing with (including necessary redundancy) and the number of physical pattern recognizers happen to be the same order of magnitude. It should be noted here that when I refer to “processing” a pattern, I am referring to all of the things we are able to do with a pattern: learn it, predict it (including parts of it), recognize it, and implement it (either by thinking about it further or through a pattern of physical movement).