Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain

Although DNA is a part of the story of your life, it is only a small part. The rest of the story involves the rich details of your experiences and your environment, all of which sculpt the vast, microscopic tapestry of your brain cells and their connections. What we think of as you is a vessel of experience into which is poured a small sample of sp

Marrying the flexibility of the brain to the burgeoning creativity of the VR design world, we’re moving into an era in which our virtual identities will no longer be limited to the bodies that we happen to have evolved.

Consider the precipitous drop in American crime in the mid-1990s. One hypothesis is that the drop stemmed from a single piece of legislation, the Clean Air Act, which required automobiles to switch from leaded gasoline to unleaded. With less lead in the air, crime saw a significant drop twenty-three years later. It turns out high lead levels in the

Your brain adjusts itself according to what you spend your time on, as long as those tasks have alignment with rewards or goals.

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

Some years ago, the writer Stewart Brand proposed that to understand a civilization, you need to look at multiple layers functioning simultaneously at different speeds.22 Fashion changes rapidly, while the business pursuits in an area alter more slowly. Infrastructure—such as roads and buildings—evolves more gradually. The rules and laws of a socie

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

At the TED conference in 2015, Scott Novich and I algorithmically tracked all the tweets with the hashtag “TED.” On the fly, we aggregated the hundreds of tweets and pushed them through a sentiment analysis program. In this way, we could use a large dictionary of words to classify which tweets were positive (“awesome,” “inspiring,” and so on) and w

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.”)