Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain

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I was really excited to read this book. I have previously read Eagleman’s ‘The Brain’ and enjoyed his TV show in the same subject. Since first learning of plasticity during neurophysiology lectures at university I have been fascinated by the brain’s ability to adapt.

The formation of new memories requires the hippocampus, but the memories are not stored permanently there. Instead, it passes along the learning to parts of the cortex, which hold the memory more permanently.” His expertise derives from his place at the center of the livewiring universe. As the CEO of NeoSensory, which makes sensory aids like wristbands that allow deaf people to feel sound, he’s been an architect of brain plasticity research for more than a decade. A child raised without human interaction does not grow up to walk, speak, write, lecture, and thrive.”

Beyond the Book

Despite some genetic pre-specification, nature’s approach to growing a brain relies on receiving a vast set of experiences, such as social interaction, conversation, play, exposure to the world, and the rest of the landscape of normal human affairs. The strategy of interaction with the world allows the colossal machinery of the brain to take shape from a relatively small set of instructions.” Whatever information the brain is fed, it will learn to adjust to it and extract what it can. As long as the data have a structure that reflects something important about the outside world, the brain will figure out how to decode it.”

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. How does the massively complicated brain, with its eighty-six billion neurons, get built from such a small recipe book (~20,000 genes)? The answer pivots on a clever strategy implemented by the genome: build incompletely and let world experience refine.” All new ideas in your brain come from a mash-up of previously learned inputs, and today we get more new inputs than ever before. Children now live in a time unparalleled in richness: our knowledge sphere has exploded in diameter, and as it grows it offers more doors for entry. Young minds have the opportunity to cross-link facts from completely different domains to generate ideas that previous eras couldn’t have imagined.”

Discover

The differences between a baby and an adult are easy to see, but the neural transition from one to the other does not happen in a smooth line. Instead, it is like a door that swings closed. Once it shuts, large-scale change is over.” Livewired is a deep, occasionally repetitive examination of brain plasticity. The author reads the audiobook and you can tell that he's profoundly excited by all this science. Reading a text copy, I might have become bogged down in the neurons, synapses, and other brain ephemera. 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. Brains are most flexible at the beginning, in a window of time known as the sensitive period. As this period passes, the neural geography becomes more difficult to change.”

What happens when disease, surgery, or brain damage result in less available territory? Just as with neighboring countries, there are two possibilities. The brain might leave out the parts of the map corresponding to the missing tissue, or the brain might squish the original map on a smaller piece of real estate.” No technology yet exists to enable this kind of flexible machine intelligence, which underscores the immensity of the challenge Eagleman is posing. While “Livewired ” is long on enthusiasm (and rightfully so), it’s a bit short on guidance for emulating or augmenting the adaptable system inside our heads. It’s easy for the hype that surrounds brain plasticity to get ahead of reality, as when Elon Musk’s Neuralink prototype — branded as a “Fitbit in your skull” to enhance neural activity — proved to be basically a miniaturized set of electrodes. brains never reach an end point (we spend our lives blossoming toward something, even as the target moves).The flexibility of the brain allows the events in your life to stitch themselves directly into the neural fabric.” the elaborate pattern of connections in the brain—the circuitry—is full of life (connections between neurons ceaselessly blossom, die, and reconfigure). 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.” As for it being one of the most important books of the decade... it really isn’t. Plasticity has been known about for a long time and none of the information in the book was more than I learnt in my undergraduate degree. Having said that it is interesting and David Eagleman does make it easy to understand.