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Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain

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Neural maps are not predefined by a genetic urban planning commission. Instead, whatever real estate is available gets used and filled.”

For humans at birth, the brain is remarkably unfinished, and interaction with the world is necessary to complete it.” Let's say there's a kid who has the worst case of epilepsy ever. Like, seizures every 20 minutes. Doctor says the only treatment is a hemispherectomy, which is exactly what it sounds like — removal of half the kid's brain. What do you think happens after the operation? How will the kid do? The highest level—where the best learning occurs—is achieved when a student is invested, curious, interested. Through our modern lens, we would say that a particular formula of neurotransmitters is required for neural changes to take place, and that formula correlates with investment, curiosity, and interest.” Maintaining territory in the brain is activity-dependent: preserving ground requires constant vigor. As inputs diminish, neurons change their connections until they find where the action is.” 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.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) 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 Details There’s a much higher receptor density in the fingers, lips, and genitals, and lower resolution in, say, the torso and thighs. The areas that send the most information win the largest representation.”

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.” 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.” The pattern of inputs determines the fate of the cortex. The brain dynamically wires itself to best represent (and eventually act upon) whatever data come swimming in.” When you learn something…your brain physically changes … The immense, intertwining jungles of your brain work themselves into something slightly different from what they were a moment before.”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.” 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.” This is why the neocortex looks about the same everywhere: because it is the same. Any patch of cortex is pluripotent—meaning that it has the possibility to develop into a variety of fates, depending on what’s plugged into it.” 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. Other surprising omissions in such a tech-oriented book are the twin fields of optogenetics and chemogenetics – techniques allowing the introduction of light-sensitive or chemical-sensitive genes into certain brain regions. These regions can then be activated or inactivated in a carefully calibrated fashion. Both techniques have revolutionised neuroscience – perhaps even more than functional brain imaging has, since they allow causal inferences to be made more securely about which brain regions participate in which functions at a given time. Human trials in optogenetics are already ongoing, and a recent breakthrough has been announced in the restoration of at least some vision in a person with the genetic disease of retinitis pigmentosa.

Drive any machinery. Brains learn to control whatever body plan they discover themselves inside of. Our DNA is not a fixed schematic for building an organism; rather, it sets up a dynamic system that continually rewrites its circuitry to reflect the world around it and to optimize its efficacy within it.”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.” 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. 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.”

Accumulating over minutes and months and decades, the innumerable brain changes tally up to what we call you. Or at least the you right now. Yesterday you were marginally different. And tomorrow you’ll be someone else again.” Self-identity is surprisingly flexible. Researchers have been studying in recent years how taking on the face of a different person can enhance empathy.”Eagleman suggests that “Our machinery isn’t fully preprogramed, but instead shapes itself by interacting with the world”, an underdeveloped claim requiring a much deeper discussion of the roles of noise, and the brain’s own intrinsic activity, in the shaping of the brain through the life course. “Noise” refers here to the amplification of small, chance events during the unfolding of the recipe in the genome, a theme emphasised by the neurogeneticist Kevin Mitchell in his recent book Innate: How the Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are. Mitchell’s key point is that the genome is a type of probabilistic recipe, unfolding in stochastic, somewhat unpredictable ways as the result of noise during the journey from fertilised egg to fully developed human. Thus, identical twins are not really identical, despite outward appearances. A child raised without human interaction does not grow up to walk, speak, write, lecture, and thrive.” Move toward the data. The brain builds an internal model of the world, and adjusts whenever predictions are incorrect.

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