Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain

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Drop everything you think you knew, this book will show you that our brains are even more amazing than we realise, and there's so much more potential for them in the future. 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 book explores and extends the phenomenon of brain plasticity, with the term livewired proposed as a term to supersede plastic. He predicts quite compellingly that these new input streams will soon stop feeling like external cues you need to consciously perceive and interpret, but will become part of your normal emotional and perceptual subconscious milieu.

This book encapsulates the vast knowledge that goes into neuroscience and the sub-disciplinary fields. If that was the sole purpose, I think there would be more energy efficient ways to achieve the same goal (like shutting down for example). Plasticiteten eller “formbarheten” minskar över tid, något som sker olika snabbt i olika delar av hjärnan beroende på hur konstant informationen är. With his new theory of infotropism, Eagleman demonstrates why the fundamental principle of the brain is information maximization: in the same way that plants grow toward light, brains reconfigure to boost data from the outside world. It’s machinery that reconfigures itself, that adjusts and adapts to whatever’s going on around it to optimize its function.Particularly in the first chapter, the writing was very jerky, suddenly changing topic, even telling half a story then abruptly switching to something else before coming back to the original subject again.

Exempelvis skickar småbarns hjärnor ut slumpvis genererade signaler till musklerna som de sedan får direkt feedback från syn, känsel och balans. Reading a text copy, I might have become bogged down in the neurons, synapses, and other brain ephemera. 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.Every single page of this book presents intriguing and compelling information and answers to questions you never knew you wanted the answers to; I found it eminently readable from start to finish.