Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain

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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. Instead of talking about the brain along the lines of hardware and software, we have to coin a new term for this — and so I coined livewire. We already have a concept called brain plasticity. That comes from the idea of plastic you can mold into any shape, and which then holds that shape. But what I realized is that the brain is doing more than that. It’s not a toy that you shape once and then holds that shape. It’s constantly changing every moment of your life till the day you die. Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator. 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. 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.)

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. 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. 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.

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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. 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: 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?

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. Move toward the data. The brain builds an internal model of the world, and adjusts whenever predictions are incorrect. 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. 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. 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.”

Ok, let's see some code

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. 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. 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? At the beginning, neuroscientist Eagleman notes how DNA gets all the credit for being the basis of life but deserves only half. Every animal today possesses DNA identical to that of 30,000 years ago, and its behavior is also indistinguishable. A caveman with identical DNA might look like us, but their actions and thoughts would be utterly foreign. Credit goes to the human brain, entirely the creation of DNA at birth but unfinished. “For humans at birth,” writes the author, “the brain is remarkably unfinished, and interaction with the world is nec­essary to complete it.” Unlike an arm or stomach, the brain is a dynamic system, a general-purpose computing device that changes in response to experience. With this introduction, Eagleman is off and running. In the first of many delightful educational jolts, he notes that the mature brain contains regions with specific functions, but under magnification, its billions of nerve cells, which form trillions of connections, look the same. What’s happening? The brain does not think or hear or touch anything. “All it ever sees are electrochemical signals that stream in along different data cables,” writes the author, but it works brilliantly to extract patterns from this input. As we age, our brain figures out a set of rules, which the author lays out in his conclusion. At birth it possesses enormous flexibility because it must literally learn how to function. Children can learn several languages fluently, but after age 10, new languages come with an accent. If a child is kept in the dark and silence for several years after birth, they will never see or talk. Neurons compete as fiercely as they cooperate. If one area stops functioning, others take over. Thus, when the vision region falls silent from blindness or even a few hours in a blindfold, input from hearing or touch moves in. To fend off this intrusion during sleep, Eagleman theorizes, our vision area continues to operate by generating dreams.