Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain

£5.495
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Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain

Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain

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Your brain adjusts itself according to what you spend your time on, as long as those tasks have alignment with rewards or goals.” The flexibility of the brain allows the events in your life to stitch themselves directly into the neural fabric.” 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. Move toward the data. The brain builds an internal model of the world, and adjusts whenever predictions are incorrect. 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.

Brains are not predefined for particular bodies, but instead adapt themselves to move, interact, and succeed. And this isn’t simply about the body you’re born in, but about whatever opportunities might come along.”The brain distributes its resources according to what’s important, and it does so by implementing do-or-die competition among all the parts that make it up.” 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.

Eagleman peppers the book with stories and examples - my absolute favourite was the way that in the late 70s and early 80s, people thought that the IBM logo on floppy disks had changed from white to red. This was a result of one of these short term adaptations to compensate for an apparent oddity of the surroundings. You need to read the book to get the details, but the cause was apparently due to the people handling the disks (on which the logo was made up of a set of white horizontal lines) spent a lot of their time staring at VDUs, which contained lots of horizontal green lines of text. (My only slight doubt about this one is that I was a person who did this at the time, but I never noticed the effect, nor did I hear of it from anyone else.) 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.” 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. Neural maps are not predefined by a genetic urban planning commission. Instead, whatever real estate is available gets used and filled.” 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.

Wikipedia citation

The ability to learn language, possess vision, interact socially, walk normally, and have normal neurodevelopment is limited to the years of young childhood. After a certain point, these abilities are lost. The brain needs to experience the proper input within the right window to achieve its most useful connectivity.” 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”

A child raised without human interaction does not grow up to walk, speak, write, lecture, and thrive.” 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)

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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.” Livewired is framed as a series of fascinating sketches about "things the brain can do." The author seems most eager to point out ways that our current understanding of the brain could lead to wild, sci-fi futures. For example, the brain can successfully navigate a changing body and environment, so why can't our things do the same? Why can't our house adjust to our needs automatically? Same with our cars, our businesses, our cities. Ideas like these are radically out there, but also seem quite plausible in the author's capable hands. Brains are not born into the world as blank slates. Instead, they arrive pre-equipped with expectations.” the brain is a dynamic system that chronically reflects the world, wraps around the inputs, adjusts itself to its challenges and goals (constantly altering its own circuitry to match the demands of the environment and the capabilities of the body; it molds its resources to match the requirements of its circumstance; when it doesn’t possess what it needs, it sculpts it). 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.”

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.”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,” Eagleman writes. 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.”



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