You use this colonial image a lot in the book, a sense of the processes and struggles of evolution being fought out within the brain itself. Dreams are our way of defending ourselves against visual system takeover when the planet moves into darkness It’s made up of billions of neurons, each of which is competing for its own territory. And that’s really the way to understand the brain. It’s because each one has competition with his neighbours and they fight over whatever territory exists, as opposed to a top-down council meeting where the territory is distributed.

And so I use this example of drug dealers to point out that if suddenly in Albuquerque, where I happened to grow up, there was a terrific earthquake, and half the territory was lost, the drug dealers would rearrange themselves to control the remaining territory. If a child has half their brain removed in surgery, the functions of the brain will rewire themselves on to the remaining real estate. It’s that the brain can accomplish remarkable things without any top-down control.

In what way does the working of the brain resemble drug dealers in Albuquerque ? Even by the time you get to the end of this paragraph, you’ll be a slightly different person than you were at the beginning. But what’s happening in the brain is what I call livewire, where you have 86bn neurons, each with 10,000 connections, and they are constantly reconfiguring every second of your life.

Everything we talk about is hardware and software. And it is capable of figuring out its own culture and identity and making leaps into the unknown.

It doesn’t write down memories, the way we think of a computer doing it. But in fact, what we’re looking at is three pounds of material in our skulls that is essentially a very alien kind of material to us. What are the biggest flaws with that particular model? His area of speciality is brain plasticity, and that is the subject of his new book, Livewired, which examines how experience refashions the brain, and shows that it is a much more adaptable organ than previously thought.įor the past half-century or more the brain has been spoken of in terms of a computer. David Eagleman, 50, is an American neuroscientist, bestselling author and presenter of the BBC series The Brain, as well as co-founder and chief executive officer of Neosensory, which develops devices for sensory substitution.

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