Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain

It tries to constantly change its circuitry to maximize the data it can draw from the world. To that end, it builds an internal model of the outside, which equates to its predictions. If the world proceeds as expected, the brain saves energy.

although it might sound great to remember everything, hyperthymestics suffer with the inability to forget the trivial. As Honoré de Balzac once said, “Memories beautify life, but only forgetting makes it bearable.”)

when they change, they do so only in small spots.

For example, Jewish religious scholars study the Talmud by sitting in pairs and posing interesting questions to each other. (Why does the author use this particular word rather than another? Why do these two authorities differ in their account?) Everything is cast as a question, forcing the learning partner to engage instead of memorize.

Reward is a powerful way to rewire the brain, but happily your brain doesn’t require cookies or cash for each modification. More generally, change is tied to anything that is relevant to your goals. If you’re in the far north and need to learn about ice fishing and different types of snow, that’s what your brain will come to encode. In contrast, if

Crick and Watson had discovered only half the secret. The other half you won’t find written in a sequence of DNA base pairs, and you won’t find it written in a textbook. Not now, not ever. Because the other half is all around you. It is every bit of experience you have with the world: the textures and tastes, the caresses and car accidents, the lan

The system puts enormous work into shifting itself to a point where it can maximize information.

At some point we might perhaps be able to read the rough details of someone’s life—what he did and what was important to him—from the exact molding of his neural resources. If feasible, this would amount to a new kind of science. By looking at how the brain shaped itself, could we know what a person was exposed to, and perhaps what he cared about?

Imagine you could swallow a capsule that would renew your brain plasticity: this would give you the capacity to reprogram your neural networks to learn new languages rapidly and adopt new accents and new views of physics. The cost is that you’d forget what came before. Your memories of your childhood would be erased and overwritten. Your first love

Tossing facts at an unengaged student is like throwing pebbles to dent a stone wall. It’s like trying to get Fred Williams to absorb tennis.