Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain

Product Information

the elaborate pattern of connections in the brain—the circuitry—is full of life (connections between neurons ceaselessly blossom, die, and reconfigure).

The brain doesn’t always hold memories in one place. Instead, it passes what it has learned to another area for more permanent storage.” 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.

Book Summary

The map congeals naturally from interaction with the world, with adjacent areas of the body staking out adjoining representations in the brain.” When inputs suddenly cease, sensory cortical areas do not lie fallow. Instead, they are invaded by their neighbors.”

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. WIRED is delighted to offer WIRED Live as a virtual conference, run as three fantastic episodes throughout the day, plus a special Wikipedia Edit-a-thon Workshop with Jessica Wade and Maryam Zaringhalam.The brain fine-tunes its circuitry to maximize the data it streams from the world. The fine-tuning is helped along by rewards, which cause broadcasts throughout the circuitry to announce that something worked. In this way, with a minimum of preprogramming, the system works out how to optimize its interaction with the world.” 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.”

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. 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.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?