Liveware

Liveware is the concept David Eagleman coined to distinguish the brain from every prior picture of it. Hardware is fixed circuitry. Software is a program running on stable hardware. The brain is neither: it is tissue that never stops rewriting its own connections to model the world it finds itself in, sculpting its physical structure to fit the statistical regularities of whatever data streams through its sensors. The coinage is not poetic; it names a mechanism confirmed by decades of evidence. Blind people recruit visual cortex to read Braille. Children who lose half a brain grow up nearly indistinguishable from their peers, the surviving hemisphere having appropriated functions the missing one would have handled. A person can learn to hear with the skin if given a reliable vibrotactile translation of sound, because the tissue does not know or care where its signals originate—it extracts structure from whatever it is given. The principle is one