Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain

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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. 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. 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. 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? Another mystery is consciousness. Do you think we are close to understanding what consciousness is and how it’s created?

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. 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. Drive any machinery. Brains learn to control whatever body plan they discover themselves inside of. Tази книга е изключително информативно и вълнуващо пътешествие в може би най-непознатата и необяснима територия - човешкия мозък.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”

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. 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”(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.