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

by Ray Kurzweil

Recent support for the basic module of learning’s being a module of dozens of neurons comes from Swiss neuroscientist Henry Markram (born in 1962), whose ambitious Blue Brain Project to simulate the entire human brain I describe in chapter 7. In a 2011 paper he describes how while scanning and analyzing actual mammalian neocortex neurons, he was “search[ing] for evidence of Hebbian assemblies at the most elementary level of the cortex.” What he found instead, he writes, were “elusive assemblies [whose] connectivity and synaptic weights are highly predictable and constrained.” He concludes that “these findings imply that experience cannot easily mold the synaptic connections of these assemblies” and speculates that “they serve as innate, Lego-like building blocks of knowledge for perception and that the acquisition of memories involves the combination of these building blocks into complex constructs.”