drive any machinery and move toward the data (brains learn to control whatever body plan they discover themselves inside of; brains leverage whatever information streams in; the brain builds an internal model of the world, and adjusts whenever predictions are incorrect). WIRED is delighted to offer WIRED Live as a virtual conference, run as three fantastic episodes throughout the day, plus a special Wikipedia Edit-a-thon Workshop with Jessica Wade and Maryam Zaringhalam.

Brains are most flexible at the beginning, in a window of time known as the sensitive period. As this period passes, the neural geography becomes more difficult to change.” The brain fine-tunes its circuitry to maximize the data it streams from the world. The fine-tuning is helped along by rewards, which cause broadcasts throughout the circuitry to announce that something worked. In this way, with a minimum of preprogramming, the system works out how to optimize its interaction with the world.” Mother Nature figured out not only how to build an eye but also how to adjust its circuitry on the fly so it can operate differently in various contexts—all to make the best use of what’s available. It’s infotropic (infotropism is the hypothesis that neural circuitry constantly shifts to maximize the amount of information it can extract from the environment … The brain maximizes its resources to interpret whatever data flows in).” An older brain cannot easily reassign settled territories for new tasks, while a brain at the dawn of its wars can still reimagine its maps.”Taking the idea further, Eagleman makes us wonder whether a livewired, self-adapting home and electric grid could be right around the corner. Trippy, sure, but why not? And that's what I particularly appreciate about Eagleman's work: he provokes us to think about *both* the stuff we take for granted *and* the radical "adjacent possible". This is especially fun since the book is talking about the very same thing you're using to read it (not the Kindle, silly — I mean your *brain*). For example, if the brain's so damn changeable, how can we even hold on to any memories before they get overwritten by new stuff? Instead of encoding pixels or transcripts, we encode stimuli with respect to other things we have learned, including concepts both physical and social. What we learn is represented in terms of what we already know.”

You are a different person than you were at this time last year, because the gargantuan tapestry of your brain has woven itself into something new,” Eagleman writes. The brain’s map is flexibly defined by active inputs from the body. When the body changes, the homunculus follows.” David Eagleman is a neuroscientist, adjunct professor at Stanford University, founder of Neosensory (“a company which translates the unhearable and unseeable into the realm of the felt”), author and science communicator. His previous books (including a much-praised work of speculative fiction, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives) have been feted for the quality of their writing and for their exciting ideas. His work on “sensory substitution” has transformed lives and offers great possibilities for persons living with sensory restrictions such as hearing loss.

Livewired" is the catchy term David Eagleman has coined to describe the miraculous ability of the brain to adapt in concert with its environment and make sense of the world. With fluid prose and crystal-clear analogies, Eagleman explains the function of the cerebral cortex as a general computing machine that can take any kind of input from environmental sensors — e.g. the light sensors in your eye, the air-pressure sensors in your ear, or vibrations from a wrist band — and turn it into meaning. As for it being one of the most important books of the decade... it really isn’t. Plasticity has been known about for a long time and none of the information in the book was more than I learnt in my undergraduate degree. Having said that it is interesting and David Eagleman does make it easy to understand. To put these two thoughts together: the brain is shaped both by noisy and unpredictable processes during development, and by its own ceaseless, intrinsic, self-organising activity. Eagleman’s stress on “interacting with the world” has to be seen in this context. Early experience becomes foundational. It develops into the architecture upon which everything subsequent is built. Everything new is understood through the filter of the old.” You are a different person than you were at this time last year, because the gargantuan tapestry of your brain has woven itself into something new.”