If you take a look at a brain, how can you tell immediately if it belongs to a piano player

or a violinist? How can a dog learn to walk on its rear legs like a human? And what does this have to do

with how you become an expert at something?

Or what would happen if Venus and Serena Williams had a hypothetical brother of Fred who hated tennis?

And how do governments respond to change just like brains do?

And finally, why am I so optimistic about the brains of digital natives?

Welcome to the inner cosmos with me, David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and author at Stanford.

And in these episodes, we sail deeply into our three-pound universe to understand why and how our lives look the way they do.

Today's episode is about brain plasticity, which is the ability of the brain to change and adapt

throughout your life. The word plasticity comes from the word plastic, which is a material that

you can mold into any shape, and then it holds onto that shape. And that is what is impressive

about brains.

You can expose them to any kind of situation or experience,

and they hold on to the change.

The vast forest of neurons in your head,

these connections change their strength,

and sometimes they unplug and they seek around and they re-plug in somewhere

else. It's a living forest of 86 billion neurons in your head and this constant reconfiguration,

this is how you learn and remember. The interesting part I want to address today is exactly when these changes in the

brain happen because it's not all the time. Most of the stuff that happens in your life

makes no change at all to your brain. So what's the difference between the stuff that sticks

and the stuff that doesn't? So let's start today in Hungary with an educational

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