Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain

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Taking the idea further, Eagleman makes us wonder whether a livewired, self-adapting home and electric grid could be right around the corner. The greatest technology we have ever discovered on this planet is the three-pound organ carried around in the vault of the skull.

It's no easy feat to make complex topics comprehensible to a layperson and those with no prior knowledge of the subject at hand, but Eagleman does this with considerable aplomb. As this is her field, I'm putting my plans to read the book on hold, unless I read something that convinces me otherwise.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.

Since first learning of plasticity during neurophysiology lectures at university I have been fascinated by the brain’s ability to adapt. This was a result of one of these short term adaptations to compensate for an apparent oddity of the surroundings.

If you said, "Well, the kid's going to lose his ability to walk, talk, do anything really," you'd be correct — but only for a few months. You’ll learn just how resilient and flexible our brains can be, and how technology is still nowhere close to being as powerful as them. Whilst the ideas are good, there’s not a lot there to use constructively and there’s no mathematical or information theoretical analysis presented to demonstrate learning in a competitive neural substrate. 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.