BY STEVE PAULSON
OCTOBER 14, 2020
Brain “plasticity” is one of the great discoveries in modern science, but neuroscientist David Eagleman thinks the word is misleading. Unlike plastic, which molds and then retains a particular shape, the brain’s physical structure is continually in flux. But Eagleman can’t avoid the word. “The whole literature uses that term plasticity, so I use it sparingly,” he says. Eagleman also discounts computer analogies to the brain. He’s coined the term “livewired” (the title of his new book) to point out that the brain’s hardware and software are practically inseparable.
Eagleman is a man of prodigious energy. An adjunct professor at Stanford University, he’s also been a novelist, TV host of PBS’s The Brain, and science advisor for the HBO series Westworld. He’s now the CEO of the Silicon Valley company NeoSensory, which is developing gadgets that send data streams to the brain so people can hear “see” and “hear” through their skin.
I talked with Eagleman about how neurons compete with one another, whether it’s possible for humans to have entirely new sensory experiences, and why he believes “you are your brain.”
You say we’ve barely begun to understand how malleable our brains are. Are they getting rewired every day?
Every moment of your life, your brain is rewiring. You’ve got 86 billion neurons and a fraction of a quadrillion connections between them. These vast seas of connections are constantly changing their strength, and they’re unconnecting and reconnecting elsewhere. It’s why you are a slightly different person than you were a week ago or a year ago. When you learned that my name is David, there’s a physical change in the structure of your brain. That’s what it means to remember something.
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