Skip to main content

Livewired - David Eagleman ****

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. This is yet another title on the workings of the brain (though to be fair to David Eagleman it was already out in hardback, so he was at the start of the queue). Thankfully, Eagleman gives us a whole new way of looking at the human brain's capabilities, suggesting the reason Homo sapiens is so versatile and capable is down to the extreme plasticity of the human brain - its ability to rewire itself on the fly, or livewiring as Eagleman calls it.

This is a fascinating topic. 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. We also see some aspects where the initial plasticity locks in, restricting future development if children haven't, for example, developed language skills by a particular stage.

Eagleman peppers the book with stories and examples - my absolute favourite was the way that in the late 70s and early 80s, people thought that the IBM logo on floppy disks had changed from white to red. This was a result of one of these short term adaptations to compensate for an apparent oddity of the surroundings. You need to read the book to get the details, but the cause was apparently due to the people handling the disks (on which the logo was made up of a set of white horizontal lines) spent a lot of their time staring at VDUs, which contained lots of horizontal green lines of text. (My only slight doubt about this one is that I was a person who did this at the time, but I never noticed the effect, nor did I hear of it from anyone else.)

The subject really grabbed my attention, and Eagleman is good at storytelling, but there were a couple of things about the writing style that irritated me. Particularly in the first chapter, the writing was very jerky, suddenly changing topic, even telling half a story then abruptly switching to something else before coming back to the original subject again. The flow could have been better. The book is also overloaded with analogies, some of which simply get in the way. 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. Similarly, there's a bizarre reference many pages after telling us about Nelson's experience with his lost arm that out of the blue says 'Most visitor's to Admiral Nelson's statue in London's Trafalgar Square have probably not considered the distortion of the somatosensory cortex in the left hemisphere of that elevated head.' Well, yes. That's probably because that elevated head doesn't have a somatosensory cortex. It's a statue.

Despite occasional issues with the writing (and a warning that if you're squeamish that there are quite a lot of medical details as a lot we learn about the brain is from the results of damage and surgery) this is one of the best brain books I've read this year.

Paperback: 
Bookshop.org

  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Who Invented the Computer? – Ian Watson

Ian Watson is the author of  The Universal Machine  and featured in a recent  Four Way Interview . Saturday June 23 2012 was the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing, the troubled genius who invented the modern computer. Why though do so few people recognize his name and his great achievements? In 1936 English mathematician Alan Turing, published a paper,  On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem . This became the foundation of computing. In it Turing presented a theoretical machine that could solve any problem that could be described by instructions encoded on a paper tape. A Turing Machine could calculate square roots, whilst another might solve Sudoku puzzles. Turing demonstrated you could construct a single  Universal Machine  that could simulate any Turing Machine. One machine solving any problem for which a program could be written – sound familiar? He’d invented the computer. Then,  computers  were peop...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ignorance: How it drives science – Stuart Firestein *****

This is a delightful little book that really gets you thinking. I stress the ‘little’ part not as a negative, but as a good thing. There is nothing worse than fat, bloated popular science books where the author feels they have to get 120,000 words to be taken seriously. This is the sort of book that can be read in a couple of hours – but you will get so much more out of it than one of those tedious doorstops. The premise underlying the book is in once sense extremely simple, yet is fundamental to an understanding of what science is and what scientists do. And it is an understanding that is totally at odds with the typical way science is portrayed both in university lectures and popular science books. As Stuart Firestein points out, what is important is not the facts, but rather the area of ignorance. The interesting part and the fundamental heart of science is not about what we know, but about what we don’t know and where we want to look next. Take this lovely quote: ‘Working ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Star Book – Peter Grego ****

This attractive landscape format book combines an excellent introduction to the stars and basic astronomy with a set of star maps, plus in depth looks at some of the stars featured, with a  bonus section on the solar system. Amazon says it’s a hardback, but in fact it’s a paperback with a rather ingenious cover – you can’t tell from the photo, but the words ‘The Star Book’ are punched through as a series of holes that show the white paper of the next page beneath. Like many astronomy/space books, the cover lacks shelf appeal because it is mostly black, but at least there is some original thought here. Unlike many books in this format which tend to concentrate on the pictures, there is a good deal of excellent text by Peter Grego, so there was no feeling that you were only getting the star maps and star ‘biographies’, something these days much more suited to an iPad or smartphone app. Instead, the opening 30 or so pages give a very good introduction that would be valuable to ...
Post a Comment
Read more