Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain

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David Eagleman: Especially in this modern era, when we think about the brain, most people think in a computer metaphor. But fundamentally, the brain is very different from a digital computer. Just as an example, you cannot tear half the circuitry out of your cell phone and expect that it’s still going to work. And yet, with the brain, you can do what’s called a hemispherectomy, where you remove one half of the brain in the young child, and the child is just fine because the missing functions rewire themselves under the remaining real estate. 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” 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. 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.”

DE: One of the big surprises to me is just how rapidly areas of the brain start to encroach on other parts of the brain. If you blindfold a person and put them in a brain scanner, you start seeing things like touch and hearing make small activations in the visual system after about an hour. The system says: “Oh, I see. I’m not getting any vision anymore. That’s cool. That means that this territory is available for takeover.” That led me to propose an entirely new hypothesis about why we dream at night. For the entirety of human history, we’ve had dreams every night, but not understood why we’re dreaming.

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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.

Edit: I have had a lot of people commenting on this review so please let me clarify what I mean. I found factual inaccuracies in the book that I know to be inaccurate because there were about my own field of expertise. The inaccuracies were referenced but did not match what the reference material stated and I had to go to the reference source to clarify what was actually factually correct. I can not recommend a book that fails to reference correctly. One of the big surprises of neuroscience was to understand how rapidly these takeovers can happen. If you blindfold somebody for an hour, you can start to see changes where touch and hearing will start taking over the visual parts of the brain. So what I realised is, because the planet rotates into darkness, the visual system alone is at a disadvantage, which is to say, you can still smell and hear and touch and taste in the dark, but you can’t see any more. I realised this puts the visual system in danger of getting taken over every night. And dreams are the brain’s way of defending that territory. About every 90 minutes a great deal of random activity is smashed into the visual system. And because that’s our visual system, we experience it as a dream, we experience it visually. Evolutionarily, this is our way of defending ourselves against visual system takeover when the planet moves into darkness. There’s this myth that we only use 10% of our brain that, of course, is not true. We’re using 100% of our brain all the time. But the way information can be digested and fed to the brain can be very different. I think the next generation is going to be much smarter than we are. I have two small kids, and any time they want to know something, they ask Alexa or Google Home, and they get the answer right in the context of their curiosity. This is a big deal, because the brain is most flexible when it is curious about something and gets the answer. Regarding switching off, I never take any downtime and I don’t want to. I have a very clear sense of time pressure to do the next things. I hope I don’t die young, but I certainly act as though that is a possibility. One always has to be prepared to say goodbye, so I’m just trying to get everything done before that time. 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.

Ok, let's see some code

livewired”(живо-свързан). Мозъкът ни се променя посоянно — той е адаптируема, жива, информационно-търсеща система. Изключителното на тази система е не в уникалността на частите й, а в начина, по който тези части си взаимодействат. Тя е динамична, жива електрическа вечнопроменяща се и самоконфигурираща се тъкан/мрежа. With masterful storytelling, lucid analogies and thought-provoking new ideas, "Livewired" is a mind-expanding masterpiece of popular science. It's also one of the most hopeful books I've ever read, particularly needful in these uncertain times. Read it to renew your faith in not just the human spirit, but also to appreciate the gifts of your own miraculous brain. 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.