Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain

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DE: Typically, we think about the brain as having dedicated regions, like, “this part is the visual area, this part is for hearing, this part is for touch,” and so on. But, in fact, the whole system is extremely fluid. There’s a certain amount of real estate, and that real estate gets used by whatever is active. So when a child goes blind [they may well become better at processing sounds than sighted people]. This is true with hearing, touch, anything. 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.

Capturing their iconic sound in a live environment is always going to be a special moment; NEBULA once again light up the stage and give you a live experience unlike anything in the stoner scene. 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. 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?A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting. 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. 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: One of the big surprises to me is just how rapidly areas of the brain start to encroach on other parts of the brain. If you blindfold a person and put them in a brain scanner, you start seeing things like touch and hearing make small activations in the visual system after about an hour. The system says: “Oh, I see. I’m not getting any vision anymore. That’s cool. That means that this territory is available for takeover.” That led me to propose an entirely new hypothesis about why we dream at night. For the entirety of human history, we’ve had dreams every night, but not understood why we’re dreaming.DT: You bring up the computational metaphor. What are your thoughts on artificial intelligence and, particularly, the pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI). Do you view such a thing as possible, and is modern A.I. research following along the right lines? 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 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. 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.

DT: I wanted to ask you a bit about neurolaw, which I know is an area you’ve been involved with for a long time. Would you mind explaining what this means and why it’s an area worth focusing on? 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. 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. David Eagleman, 50, is an American neuroscientist, bestselling author and presenter of the BBC series The Brain, as well as co-founder and chief executive officer of Neosensory, which develops devices for sensory substitution. His area of speciality is brain plasticity, and that is the subject of his new book, Livewired, which examines how experience refashions the brain, and shows that it is a much more adaptable organ than previously thought. What are your views on Elon Musk ’s Neuralink enterprise, which is developing implantable brain-machine interfaces?I was really excited to read this book. I have previously read Eagleman’s ‘The Brain’ and enjoyed his TV show in the same subject. Since first learning of plasticity during neurophysiology lectures at university I have been fascinated by the brain’s ability to adapt. 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. DT: What advice do you have for people who want — and this is a terrible term — to get the most out of their brains? Are there lifestyle changes we should be making or things we should seek to learn to promote a sort of brain health?

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. 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. 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. 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?

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. Drive any machinery. Brains learn to control whatever body plan they discover themselves inside of. 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