David Eagleman

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, um, 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, you know, got molded by the information that came through and it held onto 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 milquetoasted term.

for it so so uh that's why i'm using the term live wired because what 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the brain is building live wired devices so instead of being something like you know a phone which um you know becomes outdated and eventually the technology is not good enough and you just throw it out

Because it's, you know, 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.

And we say, oh, look, you're passing information along.

But I don't think that was the intention.

I think it sells all fighting for survival.

And in one of these, you know, amazing, bizarre, biological, you know, results, you get a human brain out of this.

But yes, it's,

you know many of the neurons in your brain die and um what you get you know in your first two years of development is this massive overgrowth of all these things growing like like a garden that's going nuts and then from about the age of two onward all you're doing is you're really pruning the garden you're you're taking things away and cells all over your body actually have this way of