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.

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

You pay attention to the unexpected bang, the unforeseen brush on your skin, the surprising movement in your periphery.

play a loud beep to someone, and use electrodes on the scalp (electroencephalography) to measure the brain’s response. In a normal adult, the beep elicits an electrical response that can be measured clearly over the auditory cortex, but is smaller or absent over the visual cortex. Now compare this with what you would see in a six-month-old child: t

In this book I’ve endeavored to distill the main features of livewiring into seven principles: Reflect the world. Brains match themselves to their input. Wrap around the inputs. Brains leverage whatever information streams in. Drive any machinery. Brains learn to control whatever body plan they discover themselves inside of. Retain what matters. Br

note that a future of self-configuring devices will change what it means to fix them. Construction workers or car mechanics are rarely surprised: the breaking of one part of the building or engine leads to a reasonably predictable set of consequences. In contrast, young neurologists are often uncertain and insecure. Although they can come to recogn

When you walk around your home, you pay little heed to the environment, because you already have a good model of it. In contrast, when you’re driving in a foreign city, trying to find your way to a particular restaurant, you are forced to look around at everything—the street signs, the store names, the building numbers—because you don’t already hav

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.

In contrast, baby brains modify across vast territories.