Livewired Brain#1: "Livewired"

It is well known, as David Eagleman says in Livewired:

“We drop into the world with a brain that’s largely incomplete. As a result, we have a uniquely long period of helplessness in our infancy.”

So why are we human babies born that way?

“That cost pays off, because our brains invite the world to shape them.”

The technical term for all this is “plasticity”. As in plastic: it can be molded into any shape, and even better, it can hold that shape.

 

However, as we know all too well from experience, for certain topics:

“(This reshaping of the brain happens) during a rapidly closing window of time. One the window is missed, it is difficult or impossible to reopen.”

The good news though is that the time-window constraint doesn’t apply for all topics. Long after baby- and toddler-hood, the brain can still reshape itself:

“The shape shifting of brains is not like the glacial drifting of continental plates, but can instead be remarkably swift.”

 

For example, researchers scanned the brains of several adults soon after they lost their vision. They identified areas of the brain that “activated” in response to sounds. Within a few weeks, they found a noticeable and remarkable change: areas of the brain associated with sight were gradually responding to sound for these recently blinded folks! It was as if the different faculties of the brain were “taking over” the now-useless regions meant for sight…

 

How fast does/can such a switch happen? In another experiment, they blindfolded participants for 5 days. Those guys couldn’t see anything for 5 days, and they were asked to start learning Braille, the language of the blind via touch. Within just those 5 days, there were measurable changes: parts of the brain assigned to sight were now responding to touch! Yes, in just 5 days…

 

But wait. In another study, they blindfolded people and asked them to repeatedly perform a touching task that “required fine discrimination with their fingers”. This time, researchers found measurable use of the visual areas of the brain for touch activities within (hold your breath) “a mere forty to sixty minutes”!

“The shock of these findings was their sheer speed.”

 

To summarize: (1) The brain obviously changes its “software”, (2) But it also changes its “hardware” structuring and usage, (3) Areas can be reconfigured for anything (sight to sound, sight to touch), and (4) It can all happen at a blinding speed… even in adults.

 

With machine learning algorithms, computers do this kind of change in software, but the hardware remains untouched. No wonder then that Eagleman uses a new term for the brain: “liveware” as both hardware and software change. We just entered the rabbit hole, Alice, buckle up for Wonderland in future blogs…

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more