Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain

brains are most flexible at the beginning, in a window of time known as the sensitive period.5 As this period passes, the neural geography becomes more difficult to change.

She calmly told you once, and you got it. Why? Because it was salient to you. You loved your aunt, and you derived social benefit from knowing a new word and being able to ask for the fruit. This is one-trial learning not because of threat, but instead because of relevance.

In the end, exceptionally useful programs get burned down all the way to the level of the DNA. Consider instincts—the inborn behaviors we don’t have to learn.26 These come about via plasticity on a longer timescale: the Darwinian plasticity of species. By natural selection over millennia, those with instincts that favor survival and reproduction te

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

Your brain assigns more ground to that frequency, because the presence of reward indicated that it must be important.

infotropism: the brain maximizes its resources to interpret whatever data flows in. And recall the illusion with the horizontal

This is why people become desensitized (or tolerant) to a drug: the brain comes to predict the presence of the drug, and adapts its receptor expression so it can maintain a stable equilibrium when it receives the next hit.

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

This difference between the rover and the wolf lies in information versus information-with-a-purpose. Unlike Spirit, the leg-trapped wolf operates with ambitions: to escape danger and to reach safety. Its actions and intentions are undergirded by the threat of predators and the demands of its stomach. The wolf traffics in deference to goals. As a r