How To Create A Mind

How To Create A Mind breaks down the human brain into its components, in order to then draw parallels to computers and find out what is required to let them replicate our minds, thus creating true, artificial intelligence.

Have you ever returned to a place you haven’t been to in a while, looked at a certain object, like a fountain on a square or a sign on the wall, and all of a sudden were flooded with memories from the last time you were there?

That’s the power of sequential ordering. Your brain catalogs all information and memories in a strict, step-by-step order, which is why you only need one small part of it to trigger the entire pattern.

For example, when your grandma makes cookies, you can vividly remember the last time you ate one just from smelling the new batch as it roasts in the oven. But when you try to remember details from walking on the sidewalk earlier today, that’s a lot harder. Only when you think “where did I come from and where was I before I walked on the sidewalk” can you recall more details.

Police sketch artists make use of this phenomenon, trying to sketch all details of a criminal’s face as accurately as you can describe them, so hopefully you’ll be able to recall the entire face from seeing one, perfectly matching detail.

This is also the reason reciting the alphabet backwards is hard, as is playing a piece on the piano from the middle, instead of the beginning!

So how does your brain recognize what information matches which sequence in your head? Simple: with pattern recognizers. Pattern recognizers consist of around 100 neurons each, you have roughly 300 million of them in your neocortex, the newest part of your brain, and they sit right within the 500,000 cortical columns, where all of the step-by-step information is stored. Low-level pattern recognizers can spot the right category of information, for example “letters” and then pass this on to high-level recognizers, which then determine “words” as the next step. When you touch a hot stove, your sensory cortex gets a pain input, which goes to the instinctive thalamus that notes “ouch, this hurts and isn’t pleasant,” before passing the feedback on to a part of the neocortex called the insula. There, so-called spindle cells will light up and create a strong, emotional response, in this case probably anger. Love, sexual desire, sadness, it’s all created here, and the reason these feelings make it hard for you to make good decisions lies in the structure of these cells. Spindle cells are big, long-winding neurons, which connect very distant parts of your neocortex – so many of…