Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain

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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. 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.)

Move toward the data. The brain builds an internal model of the world, and adjusts whenever predictions are incorrect.Why do we not include any of that in A.I.? It’s because it’s very difficult, in 2020, to see any of that. We don’t have any good technology to measure it in real time. So what we do is simply concentrate on the neurons and the connections between the neurons. In this way, we’re like the drunk looking for his keys under the streetlight because the light is better there, even though that’s not where he lost his keys. 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.

Fei-Fei Li, Sequoia Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University; codirector of Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute 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.

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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. 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. 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) What are your views on Elon Musk ’s Neuralink enterprise, which is developing implantable brain-machine interfaces? Eagleman is a TED speaker, a Guggenheim Fellow, and serves on several boards, including the American Brain Foundation and the The Long Now Foundation. He is the Chief Scientific Advisor for the Mind Science Foundation, and the winner of Claude Shannon Luminary Award from Bell Labs and the McGovern Award for Excellence in Biomedical Communication.