Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain

We suggest that dreaming exists to keep the visual cortex from being taken over by neighboring areas. After all, the rotation of the planet does not affect anything about your ability to touch, hear, taste, or smell; only vision suffers in the dark. As a result, the visual cortex finds itself in danger every night of a takeover by the other senses.

Fundamentally, the brain is a prediction machine, and that is the driving engine behind its constant self-reconfiguration. By modeling the state of the world, the brain reshapes itself to have good expectations, and therefore to be maximally sensitive to the unexpected.

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

human babies are born with few built-in skills and a great deal of plasticity, while adults have mastered specific tasks at the expense of flexibility. There’s a trade-off between adaptability and efficiency: as your brain gets good at certain jobs, it becomes less able to tackle others.

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

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.

If a blind person passed her finger repeatedly over the bumps of Braille, but had no motivation to learn it, no rewiring would occur, because the right neuromodulators would not be present. Similarly, if adding a new telelimb to your body has relevance to you, your body will learn it—just as Faith the dog mastered a unique body plan.

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.

the younger the soldier was when he got injured, the better he was now; the older the soldier, the more permanent the damage.

The loop of putting out actions and evaluating the feedback is the key to understanding not just motor babbling but also social babbling. Consider how you learned (and continue to learn) communication with other people. You constantly put social actions into the world, assess the feedback, and adjust. We rove the space of possibilities, trying out