Futurist Ray Kurzweil believes that the cloud will help expand the capacity of the human brain beyond its current limitations.

Futurist and author Ray Kurzweil predicts the cloud will eventually do more than store our emails or feed us streaming movies on demand: it’s going to help expand our brain capacity beyond its current limits.

In a question-and-answer session following a speech to the DEMO technology conference in Santa Clara, California last week, Kurzweil described the human brain as impressive but limited in its capacity to hold information. “By the time we’re even 20, we’ve filled it up,” he said, adding that the only way to add information after that point is to “repurpose our neocortex to learn something new.” (Computerworld has posted up the full video of the talk.)

The solution to overcoming the brain’s limitations, he added, involves “basically expanding our brains into the cloud.”

Kurzweil is one of the more prominent advocates of the technological Singularity, or the idea that computers will become super-intelligent and self-replicating, essentially reducing human progress to a sideshow. He is an optimist in this scenario, arguing in talks and books that the Singularity will effectively make humanity immortal by allowing us to transfer our consciousness into non-organic systems.