Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain

Product Information

This was a result of one of these short term adaptations to compensate for an apparent oddity of the surroundings. I know a little about plasticity in terms of the development of binocular vision, but more importantly I know a lot about vision and eyes. Precis som en person utan synskada inte reflekterar över hur fotoner träffar näthinnan i olika mönster och antal utan istället upplever världen som "där ute".

For example, Eagleman spends two pages telling us why the English colonists beat the French colonists in the US simply to make the point that a part of the brain that no longer sends information loses territory. He also postulates that the purpose of eye saccades is to refresh the retinal image, as anything that stays still on the retina quickly disappears, due to our brains tuning our perception for not what is there, but what has changed. When you look at the black and white lines, you experienced the aftereffect: the horizontal lines were being internally shifted toward the opposite color – red – and vertical toward green. Popular science book topics are a bit like buses - you wait ages for one on a particular topic/route and then a whole string of the turn up. Since first learning of plasticity during neurophysiology lectures at university I have been fascinated by the brain’s ability to adapt.

The magic of the brain is not found in the parts it’s made of, but in the way those parts unceasingly re-weave themselves in an electric, living fabric.

Unfortunately, on the information related to eyes there are gross inaccuracies and information that is simply wrong. One interesting thing he throws out in this book is that dreaming exists to keep the visual cortex active so that other areas don't take it over. It's not that the idea of the brain as a self-patterning system that adapts and changes as inputs vary is new, but the sheer depth and speed of the phenomenon is only relatively recently understood and Eagleman gives us a very wide range of examples, from a young child who had half his brain removed, but developed normally, the remaining half taking on all the roles of the other, to the remarkably short term adaptations that enable us to cope with, for example, changes in lighting colour and intensity.I was in a constant state of having my jaw on a floor, as this completely changed my way of perceiving what I have inside my head. Trots allt lever hjärnan i ett mörkt rum där den enda kopplingen med omvärlden består av elektrokemiska signaler.

Surf the leading edge of neuroscience atop the anecdotes and metaphors that have made Eagleman one of the best scientific translators of our generation. However, there was a problem that a fellow reviewer pointed out; some of the information is incorrect and as I read these type of books to feed my polymathic nature and enthusiasm for learning new things this is an issue.But we know it should be possible, because everyone reading these words is an existence proof: your biology includes 3 pounds of this alien computational material. Eagleman] aims, grandly, to do for the study of the mind what Copernicus did for the study of the stars. Informationen måste vara viktig, den behöver inte vara relevant för något grundläggande behov men tillräckligt betydelsefull för att en förändring skall vara motiverad. Read it to renew your faith in not just the human spirit, but also to appreciate the gifts of your own miraculous brain.