Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator. A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting. 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” For the past half-century or more the brain has been spoken of in terms of a computer. What are the biggest flaws with that particular model?

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? We’re leveraging the things we can measure and building models off of that. It’s very impressive, but modern A.I. cannot do what a three year old child can do. If you train a network to distinguish pictures of cats from dogs and then you ask it to distinguish camels from panda bears, it will fail catastrophically. It’s not particularly flexible. This article was amended on 15 June 2021. The image of brain waves shows activity during REM sleep as well as waking up, not just the former as stated in an earlier caption. 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. David Eagleman är professor i neurovetenskap vid Stanford och har grundat företaget NeoSensory som tillverkar armband med vibrationsmotorer vilka kan ge döva förmågan att höra.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”

Move toward the data. The brain builds an internal model of the world, and adjusts whenever predictions are incorrect. DT: I wanted to ask you a bit about neurolaw, which I know is an area you’ve been involved with for a long time. Would you mind explaining what this means and why it’s an area worth focusing on? 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.Livewired" is the catchy term David Eagleman has coined to describe the miraculous ability of the brain to adapt in concert with its environment and make sense of the world. With fluid prose and crystal-clear analogies, Eagleman explains the function of the cerebral cortex as a general computing machine that can take any kind of input from environmental sensors — e.g. the light sensors in your eye, the air-pressure sensors in your ear, or vibrations from a wrist band — and turn it into meaning.