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

If particular regions can be optimized for different types of patterns, then it follows that individual brains will also vary in their ability to learn, recognize, and create certain types of patterns. For example, a brain can have an innate aptitude for music by being better able to recognize rhythmic patterns, or to better understand the geometric arrangements of harmonies. The phenomenon of perfect pitch (the ability to recognize and to reproduce a pitch without an external reference), which is correlated with musical talent, appears to have a genetic basis, although the ability needs to be developed, so it is likely to be a combination of nature and nurture. The genetic basis of perfect pitch is likely to reside outside the neocortex in the preprocessing of auditory information, whereas the learned aspect resides in the neocortex.

There are other skills that contribute to degrees of competency, whether of the routine variety or of the legendary genius. Neocortical abilities—for example, the ability of the neocortex to master the signals of fear that the amygdala generates (when presented with disapproval)—play a significant role, as do attributes such as confidence, organizational skills, and the ability to influence others. A very important skill I noted earlier is the courage to pursue ideas that go against the grain of orthodoxy. Invariably, people we regard as geniuses pursued their own mental experiments in ways that were not initially understood or appreciated by their peers. Although Mozart did gain recognition in his lifetime, most of the adulation came later. He died a pauper, buried in a common grave, and only two other musicians showed up at his funeral.

A key aspect of creativity is the process of finding great metaphors—symbols that represent something else. The neocortex is a great metaphor machine, which accounts for why we are a uniquely creative species. Every one of the approximately 300 million pattern recognizers in our neocortex is recognizing and defining a pattern and giving it a name, which in the case of the neocortical pattern recognition modules is simply the axon emerging from the pattern recognizer that will fire when that pattern is found. That symbol in turn then becomes part of another pattern. Each one of these patterns is essentially a metaphor. The recognizers can fire up to 100 times a second, so we have the potential of recognizing up to 30 billion metaphors a second. Of course not every module is firing in every cycle—but it is fair to say that we are indeed recognizing millions of metaphors a second.

Of course, some metaphors are more significant than others. Darwin perceived that Charles Lyell’s insight on how very gradual changes from a trickle of water could carve out great canyons was a powerful metaphor for how a trickle of small evolutionary changes over thousands of generations could carve out great changes in the differentiation of species. Thought experiments, such as the one that Einstein used to illuminate the true meaning of the Michelson-Morley experiment, are all metaphors, in the sense of being a “thing regarded as representative or symbolic of something else,” to quote a dictionary definition.

Do you see any metaphors in Sonnet 73 by Shakespeare?

In this sonnet, the poet uses extensive metaphors to describe his advancing age. His age is like late autumn, “when yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang.” The weather is cold and the birds can no longer sit on the branches, which he calls “bare ruin’d choirs.” His age is like the twilight as the “sunset fadeth in the west, which by and by black night doth take away.” He is the remains of a fire “that on the ashes of his youth doth lie.” Indeed, all language is ultimately metaphor, though some expressions of it are more memorable than others.

Finding a metaphor is the process of recognizing a pattern despite differences in detail and context—an activity we undertake trivially every moment of our lives. The metaphorical leaps that we consider of significance tend to take place in the interstices of different disciplines. Working against this essential force of creativity, however, is the pervasive trend toward ever greater specialization in the sciences (and just about every other field as well). As American mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) wrote in his seminal book Cybernetics , published the year I was born (1948):

There are fields of scientific work, as we shall see in the body of this book, which have been explored from the different sides of pure mathematics, statistics, electrical engineering, and neurophysiology; in which every single notion receives a separate name from each group, and in which important work has been triplicated or quadruplicated, while still other important work is delayed by the unavailability in one field of results that may have already become classical in the next field.

It is these boundary regions which offer the richest opportunities to the qualified investigator. They are at the same time the most refractory to the accepted techniques of mass attack and the division of labor.

A technique I have used in my own work to combat increasing specialization is to assemble the experts that I have gathered for a project (for example, my speech recognition work included speech scientists, linguists, psychoacousticians, and pattern recognition experts, not to mention computer scientists) and encourage each one to teach the group his particular techniques and terminology. We then throw out all of that terminology and make up our own. Invariably we find metaphors from one field that solve problems in another.

A mouse that finds an escape route when confronted with the household cat—and can do so even if the situation is somewhat different from what it has ever encountered before—is being creative. Our own creativity is orders of magnitude greater than that of the mouse—and involves far more levels of abstraction—because we have a much larger neocortex, which is capable of greater levels of hierarchy. So one way to achieve greater creativity is by effectively assembling more neocortex.

One approach to expand the available neocortex is through the collaboration of multiple humans. This is accomplished routinely via the communication between people gathered in a problem-solving community. Recently there have been efforts to use online collaboration tools to harness the power of real-time collaboration, which have shown success in mathematics and other fields. 1