Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain

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My hypothesis, with a former student, is that dreaming is about fighting the takeover of the visual system at nighttime when the planet rotates into darkness. In other words, hearing and touch and everything else still work fine in the dark, and those systems try to take over your visual system. So what your brain evolved is this very sophisticated, very specific system that simply drives activity into the visual cortex. About every 90 minutes, it blasts the visual cortex with visual activity to defend it against takeover through the night. We experience that by having visual dreams. DT: What for you has been the most profound neuroscience development or study in recent years? What is the last discovery that really changed the way you think about the brain? Gets the science right and makes it accessible … completely upending our basic sense of what the brain is in the process … Exciting” 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. For the past half-century or more the brain has been spoken of in terms of a computer. What are the biggest flaws with that particular model?

Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain is a non-fiction book by David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Stanford University. [1] The book explores and extends the phenomenon of brain plasticity, with the term livewired proposed as a term to supersede plastic.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 He is the writer and presenter of the international PBS series, The Brain with David Eagleman, and the author of the companion book, The Brain: The Story of You. He is also the writer and presenter of The Creative Brain on Netflix. 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.

goodreads و خواندن مطالب در مورد این کتاب متوجه شدم که کلمه قرنیه به جای لنز به کار رفته) و در موردش از یک پزشک اطلاعات کسب کردم و این ایراد تایید شد. DT: You talked about coronavirus and, certainly, there are changes that are thrust upon us whether we like it or not. People might lose their jobs or careers and have to [develop new skills]. But what are some of the small things people might do proactively? Livewired is very good in parts, sufficiently so to make this reviewer wish that Eagleman had written a different book, because there is undoubtedly a remarkable book trying to escape the confines of this one. The long fourth chapter, “Wrapping around the inputs”, is a sometimes jaw-dropping exposition of research on sensory substitution, augmentation and enhancement. It describes the work of the author and others on bypassing channels to the brain that are in some way damaged. Normal hearing depends on the integrity of the auditory system – damage that, and deafness in varying degrees may occur. Combining some clever tech and thought, Eagleman and his colleagues have figured out how to turn sound waves into sensations registered on the surface of the skin – bypassing the ears entirely to provide a new channel of information into the brain. Other clever experiments have figured out ways of getting sensory information to the brain through the tongue, for example. This chapter left me longing for more: the details of the inside stories of the patients, the tech, the company and the lives helped are irresistible, and a testament to human ingenuity. One of the great mysteries of the brain is the purpose of dreams. And you propose a kind of defensive theory about how the brain responds to 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. 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. 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.

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.

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There’s nothing new about it insofar as neuroscientists have been putting electrodes in people’s brains for at least 60 years now. The advance is in his technology, which is making the electrodes denser and also wireless, although even that part’s not new. I think it will be very useful in certain disease states, for example, epilepsy and depression, to be able to put electrodes directly in there and monitor and put activity in. But the mythology of Neuralink is that this is something we can all use to interface faster with our cellphones. I’d certainly like to text 50% faster, but am I going to get an open-head surgery? No, because there’s an expression in neurosurgery: when the air hits your brain, it’s never the same.

Covering decades of research to the present day,Livewired presents new discoveries from Eagleman’s own laboratory, from synesthesia to dreaming to wearable neurotech devices that revolutionize how we think about the senses. 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. 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. 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? 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.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. 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. This might sound fantastical, but we all carry this futuristic machinery inside our skulls. At the moment, we have no idea how to build this stuff. But we know it should be possible, because everyone reading these words is an existence proof: your biology includes 3 pounds of this alien computational material. The possessors of this livewired machinery, we drop into the world and absorb everything around us, from our local languages to the beliefs of our societies. DE: Almost all of us in neuroscience suspect that it is possible to replicate the brain. It is a vastly sophisticated machine, but it is a machine in the end, with every cell in the system being driven by other cells. The question is whether A.I. as we currently practice it is capturing some principles about the brain. I think the answer is that modern A.I. was inspired by brain science, but has gone off in a very different direction. It can showcase superhuman performance in distinguishing pictures or playing chess or Go or things like that. 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.