Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain

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When we really look at the data, what we find is a very fluid system. As an analogy, I use the idea of continental plate drift where, if you look at the Earth, everything seems pinned into place. But, in fact, continents are floating around like lily pads over a certain timescale. That’s essentially what’s going on with the brain. You’ve got real changes going on there over time. Move toward the data. The brain builds an internal model of the world, and adjusts whenever predictions are incorrect. 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.

A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting. DE: Some years ago, my lab got very interested in the question of whether we could build sensory substitution systems for people who are deaf. That means taking sound but, instead of putting it into the ears as normally happens, we feed it to the brain through the skin. We’ve built devices that capture sound and turn them into spatial temporal patterns of vibration on the skin that people who are deaf can learn to understand.

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I live in Silicon Valley, where all the talk is on the power of hardware and software. But I assert the next century is going to be all about liveware. What is liveware? It’s machinery that reconfigures itself, that adjusts and adapts to whatever’s going on around it to optimize its function. 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.

Elon Musk with the surgical robot from his August 2020 Neuralink presentation. Photograph: Neuralink/AFP/Getty Images 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. 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. DE: The important part is to make sure that you’re doing things differently. Just as an example, I try to drive home from work a different route every day so I can see new things. Otherwise, you become an automatized zombie. You’ve probably noticed that time shrinks more and more as you become automatized in certain tasks.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? The default mode brain network is damped down dramatically when you focus on the specifics of a task, because of the action of the “task positive” network. You can test this yourself. Look away from this text – and close your eyes. Unbidden, thoughts about your life will flow. Now, try to keep those thoughts flowing while you return to the text and try to circle all the instances of the letter “e” in this paragraph. You might rapidly switch between big-picture thinking and task-focused e-circling. But you can’t do both at the same time: the task positive network and the default mode network are opposed to each other. And both are damped down by the salience network, because our attention is captured easily by changes in the outside world – things we need to be vigilant about and pay attention to. It’s that the brain can accomplish remarkable things without any top-down control. If a child has half their brain removed in surgery, the functions of the brain will rewire themselves on to the remaining real estate. And so I use this example of drug dealers to point out that if suddenly in Albuquerque, where I happened to grow up, there was a terrific earthquake, and half the territory was lost, the drug dealers would rearrange themselves to control the remaining territory. It’s because each one has competition with his neighbours and they fight over whatever territory exists, as opposed to a top-down council meeting where the territory is distributed. And that’s really the way to understand the brain. It’s made up of billions of neurons, each of which is competing for its own territory. Dreams are our way of defending ourselves against visual system takeover when the planet moves into darkness David Eagleman is a neuroscientist, adjunct professor at Stanford University, founder of Neosensory (“a company which translates the unhearable and unseeable into the realm of the felt”), author and science communicator. His previous books (including a much-praised work of speculative fiction, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives) have been feted for the quality of their writing and for their exciting ideas. His work on “sensory substitution” has transformed lives and offers great possibilities for persons living with sensory restrictions such as hearing loss. Vår fascinerande hjärna och dess förmåga att anpassa sig till olika omständigheter. Särskilt beskriver David Eagleman hur hjärnan har förmågan att tolka komplicerade signaler från sensoriska organ och av dessa ta till vara på den i stunden relevanta informationen. Trots allt lever hjärnan i ett mörkt rum där den enda kopplingen med omvärlden består av elektrokemiska signaler.

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. Eagleman writes at a level that is easy for the average layperson to understand and he relies on anecdotes and case studies to aid the reader. To put these two thoughts together: the brain is shaped both by noisy and unpredictable processes during development, and by its own ceaseless, intrinsic, self-organising activity. Eagleman’s stress on “interacting with the world” has to be seen in this context. 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.Gets the science right and makes it accessible … completely upending our basic sense of what the brain is in the process … Exciting”