Includes bibliographical references (p. 249-286) and index.

The delicate pink magisterium: The child with half a brain; Life's other secret; If you're missing the tool, create it; An ever-changing system -- Just add world: How to grow a good brain; Experience necessary; Nature's great gamble -- The inside mirrors the outside: The case of the Silver Spring monkeys; The afterlife of Lord Horatio Nelson's right arm; Timing is everything; Colonization is a full-time business; The more the better; Blindingly fast; What does dreaming have to do with the rotation of the planet? As outside, so inside -- Wrapping around the inputs: The planet-winning technology of the Potato Head; Sensory substitution; The one-trick pony; Eye tunes; Good vibrations; Enhancing the peripherals; Conjuring a new Sensorium; Imagining a new color; Are you ready for a new sensation? -- How to get a better body: Will the real Doc Ock please raise his hands?; No standard blueprints; Motor babbling; The motor cortex, marshmallows, and the moon; Self-control; Toys are us; One brain, infinite body plans -- Why mattering matters: The motor cortices of Perlman versus Ashkenazy; Fashioning the landscape; Dogged; Allowing the real estate to change; The brain of a digital native -- Why love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation: A horse in the river; Making invisible the expected; The difference between what you thought would happen and what actually happened; Going toward the light, or, Sugar, or Data; Adjusting to expect the unexpected -- Balancing on the edge of change: When Haiti disappears; How to spread drug dealers evenly; How neurons expand their social network; The benefits of a good death; Is cancer an expression of plasticity gone awry? Saving the brain forest -- Why is it harder to teach old dogs new tricks?: Born as many; The sensitive period; Doors close at different rates; Still changing after all these years -- Remember when: Talking to your future self; The enemy of memory is not time, it's other memories; Parts of the brain teach other parts; Beyond synapses; Daisy-chaining a range of timescales; Many kinds of memory; Modified by history -- The wolf and the Mars rover -- Finding Ötzi's long-lost love -- We have met the shape-shifters and they are us.

"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. And there is no more accomplished and accessible guide than renowned neuroscientist David Eagleman to help us understand the nature and changing texture of that fabric. With his hallmark clarity and enthusiasm he reveals the myriad ways that the brain absorbs experience: developing, redeploying, organizing, and arranging the data it receives from the body's own absorption of external stimuli, which enables us to gain the skills, the facilities, and the practices that make us who we are. Eagleman covers decades of the most important research into the functioning of the brain and presents new discoveries from his own research as well: about the nature of synesthesia, about dreaming, and about wearable devices that are revolutionizing how we think about the five human senses. Finally, Livewired is as deeply informative as it is accessible and brilliantly engaging"--