David Eagleman

3. In the book I address the issue that older people often say they would want the brain plasticity of young people. But there may be a philosophical problem here. The reason your brain has less plasticity as you age is because you have developed a better and better model of the world. If you could suddenly take a magical pill that gave you lots of brain plasticity again, you would forget your memories, your language, how to properly interact with other people, the rules of functioning in your culture, etc. So that would be the downside to increasing plasticity.

Imagine that you had a friend born blind, and she were to say to you "how in the world can you concentrate when you are capturing and analyzing billions of photons all the time? Don't you find that overwhelming?" Or imagine you have a deaf friend who says "how could you possibly concentrate when you're getting bombarded with air compression waves that carry information about all of the world around you?" The fact is, new senses get incorporated into our daily lives such that they are somewhere between interesting and boring, but we don't really need to attend to them very much at all.

Would be great, although quite a technological challenge. However, note that in LIVEWIRED I discuss the fact that some people with cataracts will get a synthetic lens put in their eye... and that lens can pass UV light through (unlike your normal lens). So they actually get UV light perception for free.