Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain

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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. 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.

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.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.) 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. 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) 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?

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. 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. 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.Elon Musk with the surgical robot from his August 2020 Neuralink presentation. Photograph: Neuralink/AFP/Getty Images 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. 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. 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.

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. 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.”

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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 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. This turns out to be the best thing that you can do for the brain. I actually have a slight suspicion that there will be less dementia for those of us, decades from now, who enter our older years because we had this period in our life where we really challenged ourselves and thought hard about new ways of doing things. This is very important for brain health — and this has been shown by big studies run over decades. People who are constantly seeking novelty and facing new challenges have less incidence of dementia. It’s not that they don’t get, for example, Alzheimer’s disease. It’s simply that they don’t show the cognitive effects in the same way because they’re always making new roadways in the brain, even as part of these maps are deteriorating.Drive any machinery. Brains learn to control whatever body plan they discover themselves inside of. I liked this book. Writing is clear, tight, and entertaining, as I've come to expect from David Eagleman. Perhaps the thing I like best about Eagleman's books is the strong organizing concept. A lot of popular neuroscience books I read regurgitate a psych 101 class for the first third of the book, which is both tedious and often in need of updating (e.g. it used to be thought that the brain was one continuous neural net BUT THEN Ramon y Cajal, Psychology used to not be real science BUT THEN behaviorism, and then Phineas Gage got a pole launched through his frontal cortex, and HM had to have his hippocampus removed due to epilepsy, and here we are today). Eagleman's books in contrast, discuss the topics most tightly related to his theme at hand, and often present new material or familiar material through a novel lens, which I love! The theme of this book broadly is brain plasticity, highlighting how the brain is actually a general purpose computing machine that would ably use any input presented from birth as long as it consistently predicted something about the outside world. Eagleman also sets himself apart by introducing new, often quite startling theories, as well as making predictions. 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. You use this colonial image a lot in the book, a sense of the processes and struggles of evolution being fought out within the brain itself.