Brain functon, not just structure

books:


	• Rhythms of the Brain Gyorgy Buzsaki Oxford University Press, USA, 2006 - 464 pages average customer review:based on 7 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The beat goes on!

"Rhythms of the Brain" by Gyorgy Buzsaki is a brilliant introduction to neuronal oscillations and fundamentals of brain functions. An enjoyable and useful read for both lay reader and accustomed professional.

Timing neuronal activity

"Rhythms of the Brain"
by Professor György Buzsáki,
(member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences)

There are many windows to the brain, many approaches to probe its secrets. However, a very few of them allow an in depth understanding of the most complex computational mechanisms which underlie our cognitive abilities. The approach chosen by Professor György Buzsáki in his latest book "Rhythms of the Brain" is to investigate the role of timing in governing neuronal activity. The choice is exceptionally fruitful, and sheds much new light on the emergent properties and collective behaviour of neuronal ensembles. The book is presently the most authoritative introduction to this very complex field of brain research.
In brief, the book tells that "brains are foretelling devices, and their predictive powers emerge from the various rhythms they perpetually generate". This briefing sets out the two main lines of thought recurring in "cycles" instead of chapters in the book. For the one it tells that instead of simply reacting to various kinds of input, the output of our brain is able to control its input. For the other, to do this, the brain is continuously engaged in generating various kinds of rhythmic activities, which can chunk the time and group neuronal activity into meaningful collective behaviours.
The book is outstanding in several respects. Buzsáki managed to find the fragile balance in styles and detail to be digestible to the lay person and to remain exciting to the super-specialist. Thanks to the nowadays all too rare single authorship, the line of thoughts are unbroken, and the chapters are linked together by a logic arching over the entire book. Buzsáki is leading us through various disciplines with impressive accuracy. Due to the nature of the topic, beside the numerous branches of electrophysiology (from single cell intracellular activity to MEG), the tightly linked neuroanatomy, physics, mathematics and even psychology and philosophy are lined up to bring us closer to understanding the generation of rhythmic events and their functional roles in the brain. The book is a must on the shelf of not only neuroscientist, but also of all those interested in the basic laws of our brain. The thoughts the book generates will certainly oscillate and reverberate in our mind conducted by the "rhythms of the brain".

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Like the brain itself

The Buzsaki book on brain rhythms is a marvellous tour of neuroscience from the cellular through the behavioural to the wisely hypothetical. The concepts are presented in loops and cycles, with deep foot-notes, analogous to the brain mechanisms Buzsaki so clearly and entertainingly describes. Again, modelling brain processes themselves, Buzsaki has interacted with colleagues from many disciplines outside biology to emerge with succinct accounts of neural mechanisms.

Particularly enjoyable in this content-packed book, is that Buzsaki incorporates historical gems to acknowledge the origins of many of the fundamental ideas.

In the course of a few months, this book has become my most thumbed and dog-eared neuroscience reference.

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Brain functon, not just structure

This makes an excellent complement to Christof Koch's The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach. Koch's book is oriented to structure and hierarchical wiring, while Buzsaki's book is devoted to what goes through those wires- the large-scale firing and oscillations whose meaning is still mostly unclear, but whose persistence and complexity have captivated researchers for well over a hundred years. Which is more successful at illuminating consciousness? Buzsaki, by a mile! I found Koch's book somewhat disappointing, since after a huge build up of pretty well-known visual system anatomy and processing, his treatment of consciousness amounts to a brief bit of hand-waving. Buzsaki, on the other hand, while he does not make grand claims to even deal with consciousness, illuminates more of the temporal integration that is going on in the brain, and which will be absolutely central to plumbing this question. He also leaves the reader with extremely penetrating observations about consciousness- as a whole-brain phenomenon (or at least a whole-cortex), that it must be continuously graded with the size of brains, and that it is deeply connected with timing- with an approximate simultaneity of experience and integrated signal processing.

All that said, it is important to note that while Buzsaki is capable of excellent writing, such as in the introductory cycles (chapters), he routinely loses sight of the reader when presenting his own work and fields he is close to (in the middle and later cycles). The reader has to plow through mountains of unintroduced anatomy, private thoughts that seem never to have met an editor, and woefully under-enlarged and under-annotated illustrations. One wants to give him the benefit of the doubt that he is not covering up a lack of understanding, but the text can be trying at times, at least for the non-specialist. I would encourage work on a second edition where typos and illustrations are fixed, where all anatomy mentioned in the text is illustrated and described, and where substantial parts of the later cycles are re-written- expanded where there is substance, or cut where speculations and caveats outstrip the material.

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Rhythms of the Brain

"Rhythms of the Brain" is nothing short of phenomenal. In fact, it may be the single best book I have ever read. Gyorgy Buzsaki is clearly way ahead his his time.

Bravo!!!

reviews: page 1, 2

Studies of mechanisms in the brain that allow complicated things to happen in a coordinated fashion have produced some of the most spectacular discoveries in neuroscience. This book provides eloquent support for the idea that spontaneous neuron activity, far from being mere noise, is actually the source of our cognitive abilities. It takes a fresh look at the co-evolution of structure and function in the mammalian brain, illustrating how self-emerged oscillatory timing is the brains fundamental organizer of neuronal information. The small world-like connectivity of the cerebral cortex allows for global computation on multiple spatial and temporal scales. The perpetual interactions among the multiple network oscillators keep cortical systems in a highly sensitive metastable state and provide energy-efficient synchronizing mechanisms via weak links.
In a sequence of cycles, Gyorgy Buzsaki guides the reader from the physics of oscillations through neuronal assembly organization to complex cognitive processing and memory storage. His clear, fluid writing accessible to any reader with some scientific knowledge is supplemented by extensive footnotes and references that make it just as gratifying and instructive a read for the specialist. The coherent view of a single author who has been at the forefront of research in this exciting field, this volume is essential reading for anyone interested in our rapidly evolving understanding of the brain.

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