Every moment of your life, your brain is rewiring. You’ve got 86 billion neurons and a fraction of a quadrillion connections between them. These vast seas of connections are constantly changing their strength, and they’re unconnecting and reconnecting elsewhere. It’s why you are a slightly different person than you were a week ago or a year ago. When you learned that my name is David, there’s a physical change in the structure of your brain. That’s what it means to remember something. [...]
There’s a study that’s been running for a few decades with nuns who’ve lived in a convent their whole lives and agreed to donate their brains upon their death. At autopsy, researchers discovered that some fraction of these nuns had Alzheimer’s disease, but nobody knew it when they were alive. The reason is because they were constantly challenging themselves. They had responsibilities and chores. They dealt with each other all the time, and one of the most challenging things for the brain is other people, in a good way. So till the day they died, they were cognitively active. Even though their brains were physically getting chewed up by the disease, they were constantly building new roadways in the brain. [...]
This question got me really interested in whether we could create new senses for humans. Could you feed in some kind of data stream where the brain is getting new data about something in the world that’s useful? This is called sensory substitution. In my lab, we started doing this with individuals who are deaf. We built a vest that’s covered in vibratory motors, kind of like the buzzer on your cell phone. The vest captures sound and turns the sound into patterns of vibration. The motors are ranged from low to high frequency, which is how your inner ear is also arranged, so we’re taking the inner ear and transferring it to the skin of the torso. It turns out that people who are deaf can understand what is happening in the auditory world by getting the information just through the patterns of vibration on their skin. You’re not using your skin for much of anything, but it’s this incredible computational material that you can pass a lot of data through.
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