David Eagleman

And

This changeability is what we call plasticity.

I call it live wired nowadays, live wiring, because plasticity feels to me just a bit like an outdated term in the sense that this was coined about 100 years ago because people were impressed by plastic manufacturing.

And the idea with the material plastic is that you mold it into a shape and then it holds onto that shape.

And that's what's useful about plastic.

So the analogy to the brain that people saw was, oh, you know, you learn the name of your fifth grade teacher and all these years later, you still remember that name.

So it's like the system got molded by the information that came through and it held on to that information.

And so that, you know, stands as a very good analogy.

The only thing is with 86 billion neurons constantly changing every moment of your life, reconfiguring

It seemed to me that plastic was maybe a little too milquetoast a term.

That's why I'm using the term live wired, because what really opens up when we start studying this in depth is a, an entirely new way to think about this and to build technologies moving forward.

And that's one of the things I'm going to be doing.

Speaking of the future of the brain is building live wired devices.

So instead of being something like, you know, a phone, which, um,

becomes outdated and eventually the technology is not good enough and you just throw it out because it's a layer of hardware with a layer of software on the top.

What if you could build something like a brain that is constantly reconfiguring and learning and getting better with time?

This is the framework that I put forward in the book, is that the right way to think about the brain actually is like a Darwinian competition, where each neuron is fighting for its own survival.

And when you look at single cell organisms, they're spitting out chemicals as a defense mechanism.

And when you look at neurons in the brain, they're doing the same thing.

It's just that we call those neurotransmitters.