Houston Southard

David Eagleman - Livewired

The mind isn't plastic, it's Livewired. It's a fatty mass of neural real estate. One big residential development full of investors itching to encroach on the activity of any area that can't defend its turf.

It's why when someone goes blind, the visual cortex doesn't go quiet. The auditory cortex invades and you can see in subsequent scans that sound activates the visual cortices. The brain's a churning kicked beehive constantly rewiring itself to what's most in use.

I often describe Eagleman as the Neil DeGrasse Tyson of neuroscience, but he's more of an Elon Musk for the universe that sits behind our eyes. His company Neosensory has successfully livewired the brains of the blind to see images with their skin. He's the closest thing to god our planet's got.

He shows us we remember in response to stimuli, but that the brain stores stuff literally all over the place. Neurons are associated with specific sensations. Sure, the hippocampus is involved in memory creation, but those memories hang out indefinitely in the areas that lit up the first time the experience was created. It's why an amnesiac doesn't remember their name but can still tie their shoes with their eyes closed. While the autobiographical memories are shackled to the prefrontal cortex, semantic motor memories are housed all over the landscape of the brain like little molecular bookmarks keeping those neural networks available for life. It's the body's not so obvious Dewey decimal system. Read this book.