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

by Ray Kurzweil

Mountcastle hypothesized the existence of mini-columns within columns, but this theory became controversial because there were no visible demarcations of such smaller structures. However, extensive experimentation has revealed that there are in fact repeating units within the neuron fabric of each column. It is my contention that the basic unit is a pattern recognizer and that this constitutes the fundamental component of the neocortex. In contrast to Mountcastle’s notion of a mini-column, there is no specific physical boundary to these recognizers, as they are placed closely one to the next in an interwoven fashion, so the cortical column is simply an aggregate of a large number of them. These recognizers are capable of wiring themselves to one another throughout the course of a lifetime, so the elaborate connectivity (between modules) that we see in the neocortex is not prespecified by the genetic code, but rather is created to reflect the patterns we actually learn over time.