书籍介绍
What does drug withdrawal have in common with a broken heart? Why is the enemy of memory not time but other memories? How can a blind person learn to see with her tongue, or a deaf person learn to hear with his skin? Why did many people in the 1980s mistakenly perceive book pages to be slightly red in color? Why is the world’s best archer armless? Might we someday control a robot with our thoughts, just as we do our fingers and toes? Why do we dream at night, and what does that have to do with the rotation of the Earth?
The answers to these questions are right behind our eyes. The greatest technology we have ever discovered on our planet is the three-pound organ carried in the vault of the skull. This book is not simply about what the brain is; it is about what it does. The magic of the brain is not found in the parts it’s made of but in the way those parts unceasingly reweave themselves in an electric, living fabric. In Livewired, you will surf the leading edge of neuroscience atop the anecdotes and metaphors that have made David Eagleman one of the best scientific translators of our generation. Covering decades of research to the present day, Livewired also presents new discoveries from Eagleman’s own laboratory, from synesthesia to dreaming to wearable neurotech devices that revolutionize how we think about the senses.
AI导读
核心看点
- 揭示大脑并非固定硬件，而是可动态重组的通用处理器
- 通过盲人用舌看世界等案例，生动阐释神经可塑性原理
- 提出大脑是即插即用外设的驾驶员，颠覆传统认知模型
适合谁读
- 对脑科学、神经生物学及人类认知机制感兴趣的科普读者
- 关注人工智能发展、人机交互及未来科技趋势的极客群体
- 希望了解大脑潜能、提升自我认知与适应能力的普通大众
读前提醒
- 本书为英文原版，部分神经科学术语需结合上下文理解
- 作者思维跳跃且具极客色彩，建议保持开放心态阅读
- 前半部分感官章节篇幅较长，可结合目录灵活调整节奏
读者共识
- 内容深入浅出，可读性极强，是优秀的神经学科普佳作
- 观点极具启发性，让人重新审视大脑的适应性与潜能
- 部分比喻带有硅谷技术自由主义色彩，需辩证看待
本导读基于书籍简介、目录、原文摘录、短评和书评生成，不等同于全文精读。
精彩摘录
- "In the 1930s and ’40s, a neurosurgeon named Wilder Penfield... discovered that he could map the surface of the brain by stimulating different points... This led to the discovery of the 'homunculus'—a little man drawn across the surface of the brain. 在20世纪30和40年代，一位名叫维尔德·潘菲尔德的神经外科医生……发现他可以通过刺激不同的点来绘制"
- "When the first draft of the Human Genome Project came to completion at the turn of the millennium, one of the great surprises was that humans have only about twenty thousand genes... given the complexity of the brain and the body, it had been assumed that hundreds of thousands of genes would be requ"
- "Imagine this: instead of sending a four-hundred-pound rover vehicle to Mars, we merely shoot over to the planet a single sphere, one that can fit on the end of a pin. Using energy from sources around it, the sphere divides itself into a diversified army of similar spheres. The spheres hang on to eac"
- "The brain is not designed for the specific body it finds itself in. It is a general-purpose driver that can learn to operate any machinery it is plugged into, whether that’s a biological body, a robotic arm, or a virtual avatar. 大脑并非专门为它所处的特定身体而设计。它是一个通用的驾驶员，可以学会操作任何接入其中的机器，无论那是一个生物躯体、一条机械臂，还是一个虚拟化身"
- "The brain doesn’t know, or care, where the data comes from. Whatever information comes in, the brain figures out what to do with it... I call this the P-head model: the brain is a general-purpose computing device, and the eyes, ears, and nose are just plug-and-play peripheral devices. 大脑并不知道，也不在乎数据来"
- "In parallel with the factors at the level of the individual neurons, a larger-scale issue determines whether the whole system is flexible or locked down. There are two types of neurons: those that transmit messages that stimulate their neighbors (excitatory) and those that thwart their neighbors(inh"
- "Everything we saw in this chapter is fundamentally different from the way we build our current technologies. Engineers brag about intuitions of efficiency, minimum requirements, and cleanliness. Such a devotion to trimness achieves less wiring. But it also builds in an inability to balance on the ed"
- "For a person who goes blind, expanding the other senses takes on heightened relevance, and this is the deeper origin behind the changes that allow her visual cortex to be taken over. If a blind person passed her finger repeatedly over the bumps of Braille, but had no motivation to learn it, no rewir"
作者简介
Dr. DAVID EAGLEMAN is a neuroscientist and internationally best-selling author. He teaches brain plasticity at Stanford University, is the creator and host of the Emmy-nominated television series The Brain, and is the CEO of Neosensory, a company that builds the next generation of neuroscience hardware. The author of seven previous books, Eagleman lives in Silicon Valley in California.
用户评论
可读性非常强的一本科普书，讲大脑的可塑性。通俗易懂却引人深思。
Neuropsych课的推荐 大脑真是自然届最最神奇的产物 尽管someday your brain will be the time-ossified snapshot that frustrates the next generation 我还是要趁年轻好好丰富它构建它
也比较浅
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