Dr. David Eagleman

As an example,

your primary visual cortex of the back of the head, that locks down early.

You really can't do much to change that.

And there were studies by Logothetis' lab years ago where they looked at changes to, let's say, the retina in an adult monkey, and they expected to see changes in the visual cortex of the monkey, and they didn't see any changes at all.

And that surprised them given all the plasticity literature.

But it's because the visual cortex locks down.

In contrast, these downstream areas from the visual cortex that care about things like recognizing faces or new brands of fast food restaurants or whatever it is, those stay plastic your whole life because there's constantly new data coming in on those.

So the general story is the primary areas are like the – I think about it like the –

The software kernels where, you know, if you're at Microsoft, for example, there's parts of the code that no one ever touches because that's like how to add two numbers and multiply or whatever.

That's the kernel of the code.

You never touch that.

But you get these higher and higher application layers on top of that.

And that's essentially how to think about primary sensory cortices and then all the stuff downstream from there.

That's right.

And it's very hard to direct.

So I feel like, you know, let's imagine you could take some cocktail of neurotransmitters and get total plasticity of your brain.

I don't think you'd want that.

You wouldn't be you anymore.

Who we are is the sum of our memories and the sum of our skills that we have built.

And, you know, that keeps changing.