Any book that promises on the cover to reveal “the secret of human thought” is setting the bar pretty high. But if anyone could be expected to pull it off, it’s inventor/futurist/Big Thinker Kurzweil, who’s been ruminating about the possibilities of human/computer convergence for more than 20 years now.

Kurzweil’s new book continues and expands on many of the themes he’s written about in earlier works such as The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990) and The Singularity Is Near (2005). This time, though, Kurzweil also attempts to unravel the architecture of what until recently has been the most powerful computer in existence — the human brain — and how a conscious mind can arise from electrical charges caroming around a three-pound blob of gray matter. […]