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

by Ray Kurzweil

If understanding language and other phenomena through statistical analysis does not count as true understanding, then humans have no understanding either.

As MIT neuroscientist Sebastian Seung says, “Identity lies not in our genes, but in the connections between our brain cells.”

This neocortical design is repeated over and over at every level of the conceptual hierarchy represented by the neocortex.

Memories that are not accessed dim over time.

We can recognize a pattern even if only part of it is perceived (seen, heard, felt) and even if it contains alterations. Our recognition ability is apparently able to detect invariant features of a pattern—characteristics that survive real-world variations.

we are constantly predicting the future and hypothesizing what we will experience. This expectation influences what we actually perceive.

A critically important observation about the neocortex is the extraordinary uniformity of its fundamental structure. This was first noticed by American neuroscientist Vernon Mountcastle (born in 1918). In 1957 Mountcastle discovered the columnar organization of the neocortex. In 1978 he made an observation that is as significant to neuroscience as the Michelson-Morley ether-disproving experiment of 1887 were to physics. That year he described the remarkably unvarying organization of the neocortex, hypothesizing that it was composed of a single mechanism that was repeated over and over again,2 and proposing the cortical column as that basic unit. The differences in the height of certain layers in different regions noted above are simply differences in the amount of interconnectivity that the regions are responsible for dealing with.

There are about a half million cortical columns in a human neocortex, each occupying a space about two millimeters high and a half millimeter wide and containing about 60,000 neurons (resulting in a total of about 30 billion neurons in the neocortex). A rough estimate is that each pattern recognizer within a cortical column contains about 100 neurons, so there are on the order of 300 million pattern recognizers in total in the neocortex.

Human beings have only a weak ability to process logic, but a very deep core capability of recognizing patterns. To do logical thinking, we need to use the neocortex, which is basically a large pattern recognizer. It is not an ideal mechanism for performing logical transformations, but it is the only facility we have for the job. Compare, for example, how a human plays chess to how a typical computer chess program works. Deep Blue, the computer that defeated Garry Kasparov, the human world chess champion, in 1997 was capable of analyzing the logical implications of 200 million board positions (representing different move-countermove sequences) every second. (That can now be done, by the way, on a few personal computers.) Kasparov was asked how many positions he could analyze each second, and he said it was less than one. How is it, then, that he was able to hold up to Deep Blue at all? The answer is the very strong ability humans have to recognize patterns. However, we need to train this facility, which is why not everyone can play master chess.

A very important point to note here is that information flows down the conceptual hierarchy as well as up. If anything, this downward flow is even more significant. If, for example, we are reading from left to right and have already seen and recognized the letters “A,” “P,” “P,” and “L,” the “APPLE” recognizer will predict that it is likely to see an “E” in the next position. It will send a signal down to the “E” recognizer saying, in effect, “Please be aware that there is a high likelihood that you will see your ‘E’ pattern very soon, so be on the lookout for it.” The “E” recognizer then adjusts its threshold such that it is more likely to recognize an “E.” So if an image appears next that is vaguely like an “E,” but is perhaps smudged such that it would not have been recognized as an “E” under “normal” circumstances, the “E” recognizer may nonetheless indicate that it has indeed seen an “E,” since it was expected. The neocortex is, therefore, predicting what it expects to encounter. Envisaging the future is one of the primary reasons we have a neocortex. At the highest conceptual level, we are continually making predictions—who is going to walk through the door next, what someone is likely to say next, what we expect to see when we turn the corner, the likely results of our own actions, and so on. These predictions are constantly occurring at every level of the neocortex hierarchy. We often misrecognize people and things and words because our threshold for confirming an ...

True mind reading, therefore, would necessitate not just detecting the activations of the relevant axons in a person’s brain, but examining essentially her entire neocortex with all of its memories to understand these activations.

The natal brain is distinctly a human brain with a human neocortex by the time it reaches the third trimester of pregnancy. At this time the fetus is having experiences, and the neocortex is learning. She can hear sounds, especially her mother’s heartbeat, which is one likely reason that the rhythmic qualities of music are universal to human culture. Every human civilization ever discovered has had music as part of its culture, which is not the case with other art forms, such as pictorial art.