Livewired

Livewired — summary

The boy who is missing half his brain

Matthew was three years old when the seizures started coming every couple of minutes. A rare inflammation was slowly eating away one half of his brain, and for three years his small body landed in the hospital about ten times a year. The doctors in Albuquerque had tried everything. One option was left, and it sounded so brutal that his parents could barely say it out loud: remove half of the boy's brain. Not a sliver. The entire left or right hemisphere.

After the surgery in Baltimore, Matthew couldn't walk, couldn't speak, couldn't control his bladder. Then came daily therapy, and three months later he was exactly where any child his age should be. Today he works at a restaurant, takes phone calls, talks to customers, handles their requests. Anyone who meets him has no idea there is a single hemisphere inside his skull. His mother once put it simply: if you didn't know, you'd never know.

There is a lovely parallel from human history. After the Second World War, Japan was left with thousands of military engineers who had been trained for combat. Tokyo didn't let them go to waste: it redirected the designers of fighter planes to build the Shinkansen bullet train, and the masters of streamlined aircraft started building streamlined railcars. The city beat its swords into plowshares. That is exactly what the brain does when it redistributes its existing resources to match its goals.

This book is about that one astonishing fact. Your brain is not a finished, sealed circuit that genetics soldered into your skull. It is much more like a living, breathing city that redraws its own streets every single day according to where you go, what you do, and whom you meet. You couldn't slice half the circuitry out of a smartphone and still hope to make a call, because the hardware is fragile. Living matter, though, endures. The neuroscientist David Eagleman describes this with a new word: the brain is not hardware and not software, but living wiring, liveware. He chases three big questions. How does the brain build itself out of experience? Why does childhood flexibility harden into adult expertise but also into rigidity? And what do we do with the realization that you yourself are nothing more than the sum of everything you have ever come into contact with?