Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain

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Similarly, there's a bizarre reference many pages after telling us about Nelson's experience with his lost arm that out of the blue says 'Most visitor's to Admiral Nelson's statue in London's Trafalgar Square have probably not considered the distortion of the somatosensory cortex in the left hemisphere of that elevated head. It's not that the idea of the brain as a self-patterning system that adapts and changes as inputs vary is new, but the sheer depth and speed of the phenomenon is only relatively recently understood and Eagleman gives us a very wide range of examples, from a young child who had half his brain removed, but developed normally, the remaining half taking on all the roles of the other, to the remarkably short term adaptations that enable us to cope with, for example, changes in lighting colour and intensity. Along the way you will meet: a surfing dog, a skateboarding dog, and a bipedal dog; an armless archery champ; people who hate their limbs; a man with no short-term memory; and a woman who forgets nothing. He is the author of many books, including Livewired, Sum, Incognito, The Brain, and The Runaway Species.

g. the light sensors in your eye, the air-pressure sensors in your ear, or vibrations from a wrist band — and turn it into meaning. A lot of popular neuroscience books I read regurgitate a psych 101 class for the first third of the book, which is both tedious and often in need of updating (e.At Books2Door, we believe that reading is a fundamental skill that every child should have to help improve their vocabulary, grammar, and critical thinking skills. 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.

Plasticity has been known about for a long time and none of the information in the book was more than I learnt in my undergraduate degree. From the best-selling author of Incognito and Sum comes a revelatory portrait of the human brain based on the most recent scientific discoveries about how it unceasingly adapts, re-creates, and formulates new ways of understanding the world we live in. Even though I'm a self professed neuroscience nerd, I definitely believe this book could be enjoyed by those who dont have a scientific background or understanding.Eagleman’s infectious enthusiasm, his use of fascinating anecdotes, and his clear, effortless prose render the secrets of the brain’s adaptability into a truly compelling page-turner. Doctor says the only treatment is a hemispherectomy, which is exactly what it sounds like — removal of half the kid's brain. For example, Eagleman spends two pages telling us why the English colonists beat the French colonists in the US simply to make the point that a part of the brain that no longer sends information loses territory. David Eagleman once again takes the infinitely complex brain and explains it in language that a layperson can understand— and more importantly, enjoy. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

Tази книга е изключително информативно и вълнуващо пътешествие в може би най-непознатата и необяснима територия - човешкия мозък. Particularly loved thinking about how our brain re-wires itself to new body plans, and was telling my spouse about this as they just had eye surgery and were adapting to their "new eyes" :) Real life applicability! The brain is a dynamic system, constantly modifying its own circuitry to match the demands of the environment and the body in which it finds itself. Since first learning of plasticity during neurophysiology lectures at university I have been fascinated by the brain’s ability to adapt. Not only did it have a thorough consolidation of many recent discoveries in neuroscience, but I was pleasantly surprised with a few new hypotheses to which I hadn't yet been exposed.David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Stanford University, an internationally bestselling author, and a Guggenheim Fellow. These helped to keep me engage, and helped me absorb more than I usually do listening to a non-fiction book. 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. An expert in neuroplasticity, David Eagleman explains how the brain appears to be less hardwired than previously thought, and constantly alters its interconnections to maximize its receptivity. I was in a constant state of having my jaw on a floor, as this completely changed my way of perceiving what I have inside my head.

Because when you stared at the colored figure, your brain realized that greenness had become tied to horizontal and redness to vertical, and so it adjusted to cancel out this strange feature of the world. And that's what I particularly appreciate about Eagleman's work: he provokes us to think about *both* the stuff we take for granted *and* the radical "adjacent possible". It's also one of the most hopeful books I've ever read, particularly needful in these uncertain times.But we know it should be possible, because everyone reading these words is an existence proof: your biology includes 3 pounds of this alien computational material. Your neural networks are not hardwired but livewired, reconfiguring their circuitry every moment of your life. Eagleman is particularly qualified to talk about this not only a neuroscientist, but also as an inventor creating a whole new frontier of livewiring via his company NeoSensory.