Ray Kurzweil - How to Create a Mind - The Secret of Human Thought Revealed

For example, we have learned that certain phonemes (the basic sounds of language) may be missing in spoken speech (for example, “goin’”). If we then learn a new spoken word (for example, “driving”), we will be able to recognize that word if one of its phonemes is missing even if we have never experienced that word in that form before, because we have become familiar with the general phenomenon of certain phonemes being omitted. As another example, we may learn that a particular artist likes to emphasize (by making larger) certain elements of a face, such as the nose. We can then identify a face with which we are familiar to which that modification has been applied even if we have never seen that modification on that face. Certain artistic modifications emphasize the very features that are recognized by our pattern recognition–based neocortex. As mentioned, that is precisely the basis of caricature.

The fourth method derives from the size parameters that allow a single module to encode multiple instances of a pattern. For example, we have heard the word “steep” many times. A particular pattern recognition module that is recognizing this spoken word can encode these multiple examples by indicating that the duration of [E] has a high expected variability. If all the modules for words including [E] share a similar phenomenon, that variability could be encoded in the models for [E] itself. However, different words incorporating [E] (or many other phonemes) may have different amounts of expected variability. For example, the word “peak” is likely not to have the [E] phoneme as drawn out as in the word “steep.”

So far we have examined how we recognize (sensory and perceptual) patterns and recall sequences of patterns (our memory of things, people, and events). However, we are not born with a neocortex filled with any of these patterns. Our neocortex is virgin territory when our brain is created. It has the capability of learning and therefore of creating connections between its pattern recognizers, but it gains those connections from experience.

This learning process begins even before we are born, occurring simultaneously with the biological process of actually growing a brain. A fetus already has a brain at one month, although it is essentially a reptile brain, as the fetus actually goes through a high-speed re-creation of biological evolution in the womb. 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. It is also the case that the beat of music is comparable to our heart rate. Music beats certainly vary—otherwise music would not keep our interest—but heartbeats vary also. An overly regular heartbeat is actually a symptom of a diseased heart. The eyes of a fetus are partially open twenty-six weeks after conception, and are fully open most of the time by twenty-eight weeks after conception. There may not be much to see inside the womb, but there are patterns of light and dark that the neocortex begins to process.

So while a newborn baby has had a bit of experience in the womb, it is clearly limited. The neocortex may also learn from the old brain (a topic I discuss in chapter 5), but in general at birth the child has a lot to learn—everything from basic primitive sounds and shapes to metaphors and sarcasm.

Learning is critical to human intelligence. If we were to perfectly model and simulate the human neocortex (as the Blue Brain Project is attempting to do) and all of the other brain regions that it requires to function (such as the hippocampus and thalamus), it would not be able to do very much—in the same way that a newborn infant cannot do much (other than to be cute, which is definitely a key survival adaptation).

Learning and recognition take place simultaneously. We start learning immediately, and as soon as we’ve learned a pattern, we immediately start recognizing it. The neocortex is continually trying to make sense of the input presented to it. If a particular level is unable to fully process and recognize a pattern, it gets sent to the next higher level. If none of the levels succeeds in recognizing a pattern, it is deemed to be a new pattern. Classifying a pattern as new does not necessarily mean that every aspect of it is new. If we are looking at the paintings of a particular artist and see a cat’s face with the nose of an elephant, we will be able to identify each of the distinctive features but will notice that this combined pattern is something novel, and are likely to remember it. Higher conceptual levels of the neocortex, which understand context—for example, the circumstance that this picture is an example of a particular artist’s work and that we are attending an opening of a showing of new paintings by that artist—will note the unusual combination of patterns in the cat-elephant face but will also include these contextual details as additional memory patterns.

New memories such as the cat-elephant face are stored in an available pattern recognizer. The hippocampus plays a role in this process, and we’ll discuss what is known about the actual biological mechanisms in the following chapter. For the purposes of our neocortex model, it is sufficient to say that patterns that are not otherwise recognized are stored as new patterns and are appropriately connected to the lower-level patterns that form them. The cat-elephant face, for example, will be stored in several different ways: The novel arrangement of facial parts will be stored as well as contextual memories that include the artist, the situation, and perhaps the fact that we laughed when we first saw it.

Memories that are successfully recognized may also result in the creation of a new pattern to achieve greater redundancy. If patterns are not perfectly recognized, they are likely to be stored as reflecting a different perspective of the item that was recognized.

What, then, is the overall method for determining what patterns get stored? In mathematical terms, the problem can be stated as follows: Using the available limits of pattern storage, how do we optimally represent the input patterns that have thus far been presented? While it makes sense to allow for a certain amount of redundancy, it would not be practical to fill up the entire available storage area (that is, the entire neocortex) with repeated patterns, as that would not allow for a sufficient diversity of patterns. A pattern such as the [E] phoneme in spoken words is something we have experienced countless times. It is a simple pattern of sound frequencies and it undoubtedly enjoys significant redundancy in our neocortex. We could fill up our entire neocortex with repeated patterns of the [E] phoneme. There is a limit, however, to useful redundancy, and a common pattern such as this clearly has reached it.

There is a mathematical solution to this optimization problem called linear programming, which solves for the best possible allocation of limited resources (in this case, a limited number of pattern recognizers) that would represent all of the cases on which the system has trained. Linear programming is designed for systems with one-dimensional inputs, which is another reason why it is optimal to represent the input to each pattern recognition module as a linear string of inputs. We can use this mathematical approach in a software system, and though an actual brain is further constrained by the physical connections it has available that it can adapt between pattern recognizers, the method is nonetheless similar.