How to Create a Mind: Ray Kurzweil

Another favorite book from my library--notes from rereading it today:

• The story of human intelligence begins with a universe that is capable of encoding information. The odds of this happening are astronomically small.
• Only homo sapiens have a knowledge base that evolves, grows exponentially, and is passed down from one generation to another.
• Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns (LOAR) states that an evolutionary process inherently accelerates and its products grow exponentially in complexity and capability.  An example of this would be the human genome project: The amount of genetic data the world has sequenced has doubled every year for the past 20 years (book was published in 2012).
• The world is inherently hierarchical.  Trees have limbs, limbs have branches, branches have leaves.  The brain stores and reassembles memories in a similar hierarchical structure.  Paragraphs are composed of sentences, then of words, then letters, and most fundamentally, strokes.  Our brain stores each of these strokes in separate locations. restoring them as patterns as needed.
• Our memories are listed in forward order, and we can only remember them as such.  (Try reciting the alphabet backwards.)
• The neocortex is the part of the brain responsible for memory, perception and critical thinking. The basic algorithm of the neocortex is pattern recognition. The basic unit of the neocortex, according to Kurzweil, is a collection of neurons which is a pattern recognizer.
• Images are stored as lists of features which are elements of patterns.  Hence there is much overlap and redundancy with similar images.
• "Identity lies not in our genes, but in the connections between our brain cells."  MIT neuroscientist Sebastian Seung.
• Our memories are sequential and in order.  They can be accessed in the order they are remembered.  We are unable to directly reverse the sequence of a memory.  (Try reciting the alphabet backwards.)
• Our memories are stored as sequences of patterns.  There are no videos, images or sound recordings stored in the brain.  Memories that are not accessed dim over time.
• Our conscious experience of our perceptions is actually changed by our experience. We are constantly predicting the future and hypothesizing what we will experience.  This expectation influences what we will actually perceive.
• A human master in a particular field has mastered about 100,000 chunks of knowledge.
• The neocortex is "plastic," i.e. can change.  For instance, if one portion is damaged or injured, another portion of the neocortex can take over those responsibilities.  In an extreme example, there is evidence that the visual cortex in blind people can be used for language processing. This is possible because all sections of the neocortex use the same basic pattern-recognition and prediction algorithm.  It's what the brain does.
• Only mammals have neocortexes.  the human neocortex is much bigger than other mammals. Those folds in the brain allow broader surface area of the neocortex to fit into our skulls.