Livewired
“Vivid.... Livewired reads wonderfully, like what a book would be if it were written by Oliver Sacks and William Gibson, sitting on Carl Sagan’s front lawn.” —The Wall Street Journal What does drug withdrawal have in common with a broken heart? Why is the enemy of memory not time but other memories? How can a blind person learn to see with her tongue, or a deaf person learn to hear with his skin? Might we someday control a robot with our thoughts, just as we do our fingers and toes? Why do we dream at night, and what does that have to do with the rotation of the earth? The answers to these questions are right behind our eyes. The greatest technology we have ever discovered on our planet is the three-pound organ carried in the vault of the skull. 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. In Livewired, you will surf the leading edge of neuroscience atop the anecdotes and metaphors that have made David Eagleman one of the best scientific translators of our generation. Covering decades of research to the present day, Livewired also presents new discoveries from Eagleman’s own laboratory, from synesthesia to dreaming to wearable neurotech devices that revolutionize how we think about the senses.
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- When learning a new programming language, we tend to compare with languages we know already. In fact, all new learnings happens by connecting dots with our existing knowledge. LyncLearn creates upskilling courses based on this principle. Courses that leverage your current skills to explain you the new concepts. As each of our skills are unique, it is not possible to create courses manually. We've used AI to create all the courses (3-4 hours) dynamically. Courses are in AV Slideshow format with code, illustrations etc.
P.S: The idea was inspired from a book named LiveWired.
- Read this book few years back, that dreams are a way of different regions of the brain to defend territory. So the neurons in the visual processing region stop receiving input signal when one sleeps. Those neurons can then be used by neighboring regions for whatever. To prevent that takeover pseudo signals are created to keep them busy. Can't remember the name of the book, but it was a pretty cool theory.
EDIT: found the book - Livewired by David Eagleman
- Check out “Livewired” by David Eagleman. It talks about the brain’s adaptability to various inputs and using technology to create new “senses”. I think I remember the directional thing being covered and it working to improve peoples sense of direction.
- Check out the book Livewired [1] for more interesting stories like this, plus a futuristic take on how the brain could be plugged into various kinds of peripherals.
1: https://www.amazon.com/Livewired-Inside-Story-Ever-Changing-...
- In this small demo, I first overfit a single-layer RNN, decomposing a short segment of classical music into two "factors":
- a sparse "control signal", something like a score, representing the injection of energy into the system or instrument(s) - an RNN which models the resonances of the instrument(s) being played
Finally, hand-tracking landmarks (thanks to MediaPipe) are mapped onto the RNN's input space via a random linear projection.
While recent text-to-music models are a groundbreaking technology, I'm exploring ways to enhance the _real-time_ experience (and joy) of action and reaction that comes when we play a musical instrument, or even when we tap on some random object that sounds particularly pleasant.
In "Livewired", David Eagleman discusses the astounding ability of our neural networks to quickly integrate new senses and sources of information. Similarly, I think musicians are able to quickly and expertly map high-dimensional signals onto the space of possible sounds.
I'd like to grow this collection of sensors, projections, and resonance models.
- In case it’s interesting, the book Livewired talks about this. The author also has a company called Neosensory which converts sound into physical vibrations on a wristband
