Hello, it's Chris Anderson, the head of TED, and you're listening to a special archive presentation of TED Talks Daily.

This talk features Ray Kurzweil, recorded at TED2014. Ray is an inventor, a computer scientist and futurist.

He's become renowned for making predictions about technology that are eerily accurate.

And after the talk, if you'd like to dive a little deeper into his ideas, please subscribe to our show The TED Interview.

We've posted an episode in which I sit down with Ray to understand his latest vision of what is to come.

So please join me for the TED interview wherever you listen. Let me tell you a story. It goes back 200 million years, the story of the

neocortex, which means new rinds. So in these early mammals, because only mammals have a neocortex, rodent-like creatures, it was the size of a postage stamp and just as thin, and was a thin covering around their walnut-sized brain. But it was capable of a new type of thinking. Rather than the fixed behaviors that non-mammalian animals have, it could invent new behaviors.

So a mouse is escaping a predator, its path is blocked,

it'll try to invent a new solution.

That may work, it may not, but if it does, it'll remember that,

and have a new behavior.

And that could actually spread virally through the rest of the community. Another mouse watching this could say,

hey, that was pretty clever going around that rock,

and it could adapt a new behavior as well.

Non-Numalian animals couldn't do any of those things.

They had fixed behaviors.

Now, they could learn a new behavior, but not in the course of one lifetime.

In the course of maybe a thousand lifetimes, it could evolve a new fixed behavior.

That was perfectly okay 200 million years ago.

The environment changed very slowly.

It could take 10,000 years for there to be a significant environmental change.

And during that period of time, it would evolve a new behavior.

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