What Is Connected Thinking And What Role Will It Play In Our Lives? Neocortex And Brain Function
Before We Get Into The Topic Of Hybrid Thinking, Let’s Start With An Interesting Topic On Neocortex; Let’s Start With The Meaning Of The Neocortex.
The neocortex is a thin covering around the brains of most creatures such as rodents that allows them to think and raise exciting topics.
Therefore, most existing ones can show new behaviors instead of fixed ones.
For example, when a mouse is running away from a hunter, and you see that its path is blocked, it tries to develop a new solution that may be useful or useless.
If it works, the mouse remembers it and then has a new behavior that it can use or teach other mice.
To be more precise, another mouse who witnesses this flow says that it is very clever to go around that stone, and he adopts the same new behavior.
Neocortex
However, some animals do not have this trait and have consistent behaviors. They can learn new behaviors, but they need thousands of years to understand the new behavior as a fixed pattern. This approach has been profitable in the distant past because the environment was moving slowly. It might take tens of thousands of years for a significant environmental change to occur. During that time, new behavior might have evolved.
Everything was going well so far, but suddenly something happened. Sixty-five million years ago, there was a sudden change in the environment known as the Cretaceous extinction, which caused the death of many living things like dinosaurs. Some organisms snatched the ball from climatic conditions and tended to biological and transformative evolution from that time.
This biological change occurred because of the neocortex concept that we mentioned earlier. The animals got bigger, their brains got bigger quickly, and the neocortex grew even faster, and it developed distinct folds to increase its level. If the neocortex Grabs a human and opens it, it is the size of a napkin and still has a thin structure as thin as a napkin.
However, it has many grooves and twists that now cover 80% of our brain and is the part that we think about and allows us to make essential changes in life. We still have that old brain that gives us motivation and motivation.
I may have a motivation for success, in which case the neocortex transforms it into a poem, a program, or a speech, and that’s what the neocortex does.
In general, the brain works as a set of modules. Each module can do things with a specific pattern. It can learn a routine, memorize away, execute a design, and in all cases, these modules were organized in hierarchies.
We created this hierarchy with our thinking. The amount of information we get from neuroscience about the brain doubles every year. We can now see inside a living brain and see the connections of individual nerves.
Scientists today can observe your brain as it generates your thoughts, and they can keep that your thoughts generate your brain, which is the key to understanding how it works.
How the brain works
Let me briefly describe how the brain works. To explain the function of the brain as quickly as possible, scientists have divided the different parts of the brain into modules, claiming that we have about 300 million modules and have created them in hierarchies.
Let’s give a simple example to illustrate the point. Suppose a human has a large number of modules that can detect the horizontal line between the large A, and this is the only thing that matters to the modules, and they move on to the next step.
These layers are organized at conceptual levels, and each layer is more abstract than the other. So the next layer says: big A, then goes to the higher layer, which says: Apple, and so on, the information goes to the subsequent layers.
If Apple’s word recognizer sees the letters APPL, it says to itself, and I think there’s probably a blank E instead. And then it sends a signal to all the E identifiers that if you are looking for an E, I think soon it will come, the E identifiers will focus, and they will see something incomprehensible that could be E.
You usually do not think so, but we expect an E that is good enough, and yes, I saw an E, then the Apple ID says: Yes, I saw Apple.
We go up to five levels, and now you are at the top of this hierarchy which is divided into several senses; you may have a module that sees a particular piece, hears a specific sound, feels a certain era, and then says: Someone enters the room.
Go ten times higher, and then you are at the highest level. You’ve probably reached the frontal cortex, and you have modules there that say: this is funny, interesting.
You might think these activities are very complex, but what is complicated is the hierarchy below them. For example, in a surgical operation, doctors had to operate on a person’s brain while he was conscious because the surgeons wanted to talk to him.
That person laughed when they stimulated tiny parts of his neocortex. For this reason, they initially thought they were provoking some laughter reaction, but this was not the case.
They quickly realized that they found a spot in his brain that recognizes humor, and when the surgeons stimulated this spot, that person found everything funny. As the man told the doctors, you gentlemen standing there are hilarious; that was his usual opinion.
How do we act today?
Computers are learning a human language using techniques similar to the neocortex. The algorithms are identical to what is called the Markov hidden hierarchical model. Jeopardy is a comprehensive natural language game in which Watson scored the most points. Computers understand human language and gain knowledge by reading Wikipedia and other encyclopedias.
Today, search engines are no longer just looking for links and combinations of words; they are understanding. Studying to understand the billions of pages on the web and in books is a simple task for today’s algorithms.
Twenty years ago, we had nanorobots because another growing trend is shrinking technology.
Nanorobots enter our brains through blood vessels and attach our neocortex to an artificial neocortex in the cloud, which expands our neocortex.
You have a computer on your phone today, but if you need tens of thousands of computers in just a few seconds to do a complex search, you can access it in the cloud in a second or two. In 2030, if you need an extra neocortex, you can connect directly to the cloud in your brain.
So I’m walking, saying, ‘Oh, Arash is here, and he’s coming to me. I’d better say something clever. I have three seconds. The 300 million modules in my neocortex can not do that because I need another billion, and I can access it in the cloud.
Then our thinking will be a link between biological and non-biological thinking.
But the non-biological part is the subject of the law of accelerated change. The changes will grow exponentially, and remember what happened the last time we expanded our neocortex.
Two million years ago, we became humanoids and expanded this prominent forehead. Other mammals have oblique eyebrows. They lack an anterior cortex, but the anterior cortex is not a qualitative difference.
But also the quantitative expansion of the neocortex, but this extra amount of thinking was the factor that enabled us to make the leap and invent languages, art, science, and technology.
No one else has done it, and in a few decades, we plan to do it again. We plan to expand our neocortex again, but we will not limit it by a fixed architecture framework this time.
The neocortex expands without restriction; that extra amount will again be a factor that will allow us to make another leap in culture and technology.