If a child has half their brain removed in surgery, the functions of the brain will rewire themselves on to the remaining real estate.

It’s that the brain can accomplish remarkable things without any top-down control. In what way does the working of the brain resemble drug dealers in Albuquerque ? Even by the time you get to the end of this paragraph, you’ll be a slightly different person than you were at the beginning. But what’s happening in the brain is what I call livewire, where you have 86bn neurons, each with 10,000 connections, and they are constantly reconfiguring every second of your life. Everything we talk about is hardware and software. And it is capable of figuring out its own culture and identity and making leaps into the unknown. It doesn’t write down memories, the way we think of a computer doing it.

But in fact, what we’re looking at is three pounds of material in our skulls that is essentially a very alien kind of material to us. What are the biggest flaws with that particular model? His area of speciality is brain plasticity, and that is the subject of his new book, Livewired, which examines how experience refashions the brain, and shows that it is a much more adaptable organ than previously thought.įor the past half-century or more the brain has been spoken of in terms of a computer. David Eagleman, 50, is an American neuroscientist, bestselling author and presenter of the BBC series The Brain, as well as co-founder and chief executive officer of Neosensory, which develops devices for sensory substitution.

The brain by david eagleman book