How to Create a Mind

Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil sets out a theory of how the brain produces thought and how that design could be copied in machines. Drawing on thought experiments such as reciting the alphabet backward, he argues that the neocortex is a hierarchy of some 300 million general pattern recognizers, an idea he calls the Pattern Recognition Theory of Mind. He then proposes building an artificial intelligence on the same plan, using techniques like hidden Markov models and genetic algorithms from his own work on speech recognition, and revisits his law of accelerating returns. Critics said the subtitle promised too much while praising his clear writing. Published in 2012, it reached the New York Times best seller list.

Naveen Jain called it a great book for understanding how the human brain works.