David Eagleman

a cell that has these things that these sort of roadways that come off of it.

And we give them fancy names and they have, you know, but it's just a cell.

It's just trafficking proteins around and putting receptors there and spitting out chemicals.

And it looks exactly the same across the animal kingdom.

And so all that we're doing, all mother nature is doing, I should say, is, you know, just wiring this up in different ways.

Yeah, brain plasticity is what we term this in the field.

And this just means the ability of the brain to reconfigure itself.

So neurons, the cells in the brain, are spending their whole lives plugging and unplugging and seeking and finding other places and changing the strength of their connection with other neurons.

Each neuron connects to about 10,000 other neurons.

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I call it live wired nowadays, live wiring, because plasticity feels to me just a bit like an outdated term in the sense that this was coined about 100 years ago because people were impressed by plastic manufacturing.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