Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain

Reward is a powerful way to rewire the brain, but happily your brain doesn’t require cookies or cash for each modification. More generally, change is tied to anything that is relevant to your goals. If you’re in the far north and need to learn about ice fishing and different types of snow, that’s what your brain will come to encode. In contrast, if

Your brain doesn’t want to pay the energy cost of spiking neurons, so the goal is to reconfigure the network to waste as little power as possible.

The loop of putting out actions and evaluating the feedback is the key to understanding not just motor babbling but also social babbling. Consider how you learned (and continue to learn) communication with other people. You constantly put social actions into the world, assess the feedback, and adjust. We rove the space of possibilities, trying out

human babies are born with few built-in skills and a great deal of plasticity, while adults have mastered specific tasks at the expense of flexibility. There’s a trade-off between adaptability and efficiency: as your brain gets good at certain jobs, it becomes less able to tackle others.

We suggest that dreaming exists to keep the visual cortex from being taken over by neighboring areas. After all, the rotation of the planet does not affect anything about your ability to touch, hear, taste, or smell; only vision suffers in the dark. As a result, the visual cortex finds itself in danger every night of a takeover by the other senses.

Fundamentally, the brain is a prediction machine, and that is the driving engine behind its constant self-reconfiguration. By modeling the state of the world, the brain reshapes itself to have good expectations, and therefore to be maximally sensitive to the unexpected.

At the extreme, this is how reptile visual systems work: they can’t see you if you stand still, because they only register change. They don’t bother with position. And such a system is perfectly sufficient: reptiles have been surviving and thriving for tens of millions of years.

The highest level—where the best learning occurs—is achieved when a student is invested, curious, interested. Through our modern lens, we would say that a particular formula of neurotransmitters is required for neural changes to take place, and that formula correlates with investment, curiosity, and interest.

This difference between the rover and the wolf lies in information versus information-with-a-purpose. Unlike Spirit, the leg-trapped wolf operates with ambitions: to escape danger and to reach safety. Its actions and intentions are undergirded by the threat of predators and the demands of its stomach. The wolf traffics in deference to goals. As a r