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1-Page Summary of How to Create A Mind

Overview

Ray Kurzweil’s book The Singularity Is Near (2005) presents how evolution is drawing ever closer to a dramatic new phase. In 2029, computers will be smarter than humans in terms of logic and math, but they’ll also have human-like qualities such as creativity and free will. This event will profoundly change the way we live our lives, so we must consider what effects it may have on humanity in the future.

You will learn about how a small whiff of perfume can unearth your memories, why you brush your teeth is an example of information processing in the brain, and when artificial intelligence will become as commonplace as washing machines.

Big Idea #1: The human brain stores information in a specific, organized way.

Memory is a curious thing. You might not think about an event for years, but one small detail can bring back the memory with amazing clarity.

Interestingly, this tells us a lot about how the brain organizes information. The brain stores patterns and can recall them later. For example, if you were walking down a sidewalk recently, could you remember any details? Could you describe even one person who might have passed by?

When trying to remember a person, it can be hard to visualize the details of that person. However, certain techniques can help you recall memories associated with that person. For example, police sketch artists show people a collection of faces to trigger their memory and recover information about someone they’re trying to find. The brain stores information as patterns, so seeing similar eyebrows could help one remember other facial features – in this case, an entire face.


Things like this happen all the time. It’s possible to unlock memories from your childhood or past with something as simple as a smell or taste.

A lot of memory techniques rely on a simple principle: if you can get your hands on just one piece of a pattern, the rest will reveal itself. You can see this in action with some thought experiments that show how our brain retrieves information. For example, you probably know the alphabet forwards and backwards, but try to recite it backwards! It’s not easy because we don’t store things that way.

Similarly, it’s hard to play a piece of music if you start in the middle. This is because the brain stores information sequentially. So starting at an odd point feels unnatural and doesn’t fit together well.

Big Idea #2: The neocortex is responsible for memory and thinking.

The neocortex is the outermost part of the brain. It’s unique to humans and accounts for most of our brains’ mass. The neocortex controls many important functions, such as object recognition, language comprehension and body control.

The brain’s neocortex organizes information hierarchically. This makes sense because everything we do can be broken down into hierarchies and patterns, including thinking.

To illustrate this, think of the steps involved in getting ready for bed. First, you brush your teeth. Within that step are other smaller steps: putting toothpaste on the toothbrush, actually brushing and rinsing with water. Your brain stores these small steps in cortical columns, which are uniformly organized groupings of neurons found in the neocortex. There are about 500,000 such columns in the neocortex and each column contains about 60 thousand neurons.

The Power Of The Cortical Column

by Dr. James Olds

“If man can solve how a single cortical column works,” says Olds “he will know more than he knows now about how his own brain works.”

— from an article by Norman Doidge

How to Create A Mind Book Summary, by Ray Kurzweil

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