Eagleman peppers the book with stories and examples - my absolute favourite was the way that in the late 70s and early 80s, people thought that the IBM logo on floppy disks had changed from white to red. This was a result of one of these short term adaptations to compensate for an apparent oddity of the surroundings. You need to read the book to get the details, but the cause was apparently due to the people handling the disks (on which the logo was made up of a set of white horizontal lines) spent a lot of their time staring at VDUs, which contained lots of horizontal green lines of text. (My only slight doubt about this one is that I was a person who did this at the time, but I never noticed the effect, nor did I hear of it from anyone else.) Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain is a non-fiction book by David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Stanford University. [1] The book explores and extends the phenomenon of brain plasticity, with the term livewired proposed as a term to supersede plastic. An altogether fascinating tour of the astonishing plasticity and interconnectedness inside the cranial cradle of all of our experience of reality, animated by Eagleman’s erudite enthusiasm for his subject, aglow with the ecstasy of sense-making that comes when the seemingly unconnected snaps into a consummate totality of understanding”

Drive any machinery. Brains learn to control whatever body plan they discover themselves inside of. What are your views on Elon Musk ’s Neuralink enterprise, which is developing implantable brain-machine interfaces?At the beginning, neuroscientist Eagleman notes how DNA gets all the credit for being the basis of life but deserves only half. Every animal today possesses DNA identical to that of 30,000 years ago, and its behavior is also indistinguishable. A caveman with identical DNA might look like us, but their actions and thoughts would be utterly foreign. Credit goes to the human brain, entirely the creation of DNA at birth but unfinished. “For humans at birth,” writes the author, “the brain is remarkably unfinished, and interaction with the world is nec­essary to complete it.” Unlike an arm or stomach, the brain is a dynamic system, a general-purpose computing device that changes in response to experience. With this introduction, Eagleman is off and running. In the first of many delightful educational jolts, he notes that the mature brain contains regions with specific functions, but under magnification, its billions of nerve cells, which form trillions of connections, look the same. What’s happening? The brain does not think or hear or touch anything. “All it ever sees are electrochemical signals that stream in along different data cables,” writes the author, but it works brilliantly to extract patterns from this input. As we age, our brain figures out a set of rules, which the author lays out in his conclusion. At birth it possesses enormous flexibility because it must literally learn how to function. Children can learn several languages fluently, but after age 10, new languages come with an accent. If a child is kept in the dark and silence for several years after birth, they will never see or talk. Neurons compete as fiercely as they cooperate. If one area stops functioning, others take over. Thus, when the vision region falls silent from blindness or even a few hours in a blindfold, input from hearing or touch moves in. To fend off this intrusion during sleep, Eagleman theorizes, our vision area continues to operate by generating dreams. Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator. DE: Some years ago, my lab got very interested in the question of whether we could build sensory substitution systems for people who are deaf. That means taking sound but, instead of putting it into the ears as normally happens, we feed it to the brain through the skin. We’ve built devices that capture sound and turn them into spatial temporal patterns of vibration on the skin that people who are deaf can learn to understand. Tази книга е изключително информативно и вълнуващо пътешествие в може би най-непознатата и необяснима територия - човешкия мозък. Delivers an intellectually exhilarating look at neuroplasticity . . . Eagleman’s skill as teacher, bold vision, and command of current research will make this superb work a curious reader’s delight.” — Publishers Weekly (starred)

A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting. Our machinery isn’t fully preprogrammed, but instead shapes itself by interacting with the world,” Eagleman writes. “You are a different person than you were at this time last year, because the gargantuan tapestry of your brain has woven itself into something new.”He is the writer and presenter of the international PBS series, The Brain with David Eagleman, and the author of the companion book, The Brain: The Story of You. He is also the writer and presenter of The Creative Brain on Netflix. Move toward the data. The brain builds an internal model of the world, and adjusts whenever predictions are incorrect. Capturing their iconic sound in a live environment is always going to be a special moment; NEBULA once again light up the stage and give you a live experience unlike anything in the stoner scene. Gets the science right and makes it accessible … completely upending our basic sense of what the brain is in the process … Exciting” Taking the idea further, Eagleman makes us wonder whether a livewired, self-adapting home and electric grid could be right around the corner. Trippy, sure, but why not? And that's what I particularly appreciate about Eagleman's work: he provokes us to think about *both* the stuff we take for granted *and* the radical "adjacent possible". This is especially fun since the book is talking about the very same thing you're using to read it (not the Kindle, silly — I mean your *brain*). For example, if the brain's so damn changeable, how can we even hold on to any memories before they get overwritten by new stuff?

From the best-selling author of Incognito and Sum comes a revelatory portrait of the human brain based on the most recent scientific discoveries about how it unceasingly adapts, re-creates, and formulates new ways of understanding the world we live in.The magic of the brain is not found in the parts it’s made of but in the way those parts unceasingly reweave themselves in an electric living fabric. And there is no more accomplished and accessible guide than renowned neuroscientist David Eagleman to help us understand the nature and changing texture of that fabric. With his hallmark clarity and enthusiasm he reveals the myriad ways that the brain absorbs experience: developing, redeploying, organizing, and arranging the data it receives from the body’s own absorption of external stimuli, which enables us to gain the skills, the facilities, and the practices that make us who we are. Eagleman covers decades of the most important research into the functioning of the brain and presents new discoveries from his own research as well: about the nature of synesthesia, about dreaming, and about wearable devices that are revolutionizing how we think about the five human senses. Finally, Livewired is as deeply informative as it is accessible and brilliantly engaging. Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain by David Eagleman – eBook DetailsVår fascinerande hjärna och dess förmåga att anpassa sig till olika omständigheter. Särskilt beskriver David Eagleman hur hjärnan har förmågan att tolka komplicerade signaler från sensoriska organ och av dessa ta till vara på den i stunden relevanta informationen. Trots allt lever hjärnan i ett mörkt rum där den enda kopplingen med omvärlden består av elektrokemiska signaler. DT: Another topic you discuss in the book is this notion of neural redeployment. Could you explain what that refers to? It seems a fascinating phenomena.

My hypothesis, with a former student, is that dreaming is about fighting the takeover of the visual system at nighttime when the planet rotates into darkness. In other words, hearing and touch and everything else still work fine in the dark, and those systems try to take over your visual system. So what your brain evolved is this very sophisticated, very specific system that simply drives activity into the visual cortex. About every 90 minutes, it blasts the visual cortex with visual activity to defend it against takeover through the night. We experience that by having visual dreams. The answers to these questions are right behind our eyes. The greatest technology we have ever discovered on our planet is the three-pound organ carried in the vault of the skull. This book is not simply about what the brain is; it is about what it does. The magic of the brain is not found in the parts it’s made of but in the way those parts unceasingly reweave themselves in an electric, living fabric. David Eagleman, 50, is an American neuroscientist, bestselling author and presenter of the BBC series The Brain, as well as co-founder and chief executive officer of Neosensory, which develops devices for sensory substitution. His area of speciality is brain plasticity, and that is the subject of his new book, Livewired, which examines how experience refashions the brain, and shows that it is a much more adaptable organ than previously thought. This turns out to be the best thing that you can do for the brain. I actually have a slight suspicion that there will be less dementia for those of us, decades from now, who enter our older years because we had this period in our life where we really challenged ourselves and thought hard about new ways of doing things. This is very important for brain health — and this has been shown by big studies run over decades. People who are constantly seeking novelty and facing new challenges have less incidence of dementia. It’s not that they don’t get, for example, Alzheimer’s disease. It’s simply that they don’t show the cognitive effects in the same way because they’re always making new roadways in the brain, even as part of these maps are deteriorating. You will never think about your brain in the same way again. The brain is often portrayed as an organ with different regions dedicated to specific tasks. But that textbook model is wrong. The brain is a dynamic system, constantly modifying its own circuitry to match the demands of the environment and the body in which it finds itself. If you were to zoom into the living, microscopic cosmos inside the skull, you would witness tentacle-like extensions grasping, bumping, sensing, searching for the right connections to establish or forego, like denizens of a country establishing friendships, marriages, neighbourhoods, political parties, vendettas, and social networks. It's a mysterious kind of computational material, an organic three-dimensional textile that adjusts itself to operate with maximum efficiency.

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There is much to extract from this fascinating work, that is recommended for readers interested in neuroscience, technology, and the intersection of the two.” — Library Journal(starred) DT: You talked about coronavirus and, certainly, there are changes that are thrust upon us whether we like it or not. People might lose their jobs or careers and have to [develop new skills]. But what are some of the small things people might do proactively? I liked this book. Writing is clear, tight, and entertaining, as I've come to expect from David Eagleman. Perhaps the thing I like best about Eagleman's books is the strong organizing concept. A lot of popular neuroscience books I read regurgitate a psych 101 class for the first third of the book, which is both tedious and often in need of updating (e.g. it used to be thought that the brain was one continuous neural net BUT THEN Ramon y Cajal, Psychology used to not be real science BUT THEN behaviorism, and then Phineas Gage got a pole launched through his frontal cortex, and HM had to have his hippocampus removed due to epilepsy, and here we are today). Eagleman's books in contrast, discuss the topics most tightly related to his theme at hand, and often present new material or familiar material through a novel lens, which I love! The theme of this book broadly is brain plasticity, highlighting how the brain is actually a general purpose computing machine that would ably use any input presented from birth as long as it consistently predicted something about the outside world. Eagleman also sets himself apart by introducing new, often quite startling theories, as well as making predictions. Modern neuroscience has so much to say about what to do about mental illness, about drug addiction, traumatic brain injuries, and so on. That’s why it’s critical that we get neuroscience into the legal system.”