The Brain from Inside Out Quotes

“brain is not an information-absorbing, perpetual coding device, as it is often portrayed, but a venture-seeking explorer, an action-obsessed agent constantly controlling the body’s actuators and sensors to test its hypotheses. The brain ceaselessly interacts with, rather than just detects, the external world in order to remain itself. It is through such exploration that correlations and interactions acquire meaning and become information (Chapter 5). Brains do not process information: they create it.”
― György Buzsáki, The Brain from Inside Out

“Artifacts, and, eventually, words can readily communicate semantic information from one brain to another without laborious episodic exploration by each individual. Instead, the grounding of meaning is simply achieved by guidance or approval from others. Externalized information can be named, and, therefore, it rapidly spreads semantic knowledge. This ability comes with a cost, though. We accept the definition of events and phenomena too often without personal experience, accumulating and using a huge vocabulary in which we do not understand the true meaning of many words.”
― György Buzsáki, The Brain from Inside Out

“There are numerous brain rhythms, from approximately 0.02 to 600 cycles per second (Hz), covering more than four order of temporal magnitude. Many of these discrete brain rhythms have been known for decades, but it was only recently recognized that these oscillation bands form a geometric progression on a linear frequency scale or a linear progression on a natural logarithmic scale. leading to a natural separation of at least ten frequency bands. The neighbouring bands have a roughly constant ratio of e = 2,718 - the base for the natural logarithm. Because of this non-integer relationship among the various brain rhythms, the different frequencies can never perfectly entrain each other. Instead, the interference they produce gives rise to metastability, a perpetual fluctuation between unstable and transiently stable states, like waves in the ocean. The constantly interfering network rhythms can never settle to a stable attractor, using the parlance of nonlinear dynamics. This explains the ever-changing landscape of the EEG.”
― György Buzsáki, The Brain from Inside Out

“Thoughts are only useful if they lead to action, even if that action is delayed by days or years. These same brain areas and mechanisms are also responsible for externalizing thought in the form of artifacts, language, art, and literature.”
― György Buzsáki, The Brain from Inside Out

“Causality is the most critical pillar of scientific inference in the Western world. Revealing a cause amounts to an explanation. However, other cultures that do not rely on cause-and-effect arguments can also arrive at valid scientific conclusions. The concept of causation is especially problematic in self-organized systems with amplifying-damping feedback loops, such as the brain. Causes in such systems are often circular or multidirectional; events are not caused but emerge from the interaction of multiple elements.”
― György Buzsáki, The Brain from Inside Out

“The brain evolved not to represent anything but to help its host body to survive and reproduce.”
― György Buzsáki, The Brain from Inside Out

“Neurons on the two ends of the log-normal distribution of activity organize themselves differently. Fast-firing neurons are better connected with each other and burst more than slow-firing neurons. The more strongly connected faster firing neurons form a “rich club” with better access to the entire neuronal population, share such information among themselves, and, therefore, generalize across situations. In contrast, slow firing neurons keep their independent solitude and elevate their activity only in unique situations. The two tails of the distribution are maintained by a homeostatic process during non-REM sleep. The emerging picture is that a simple measure, such as the baseline firing frequency, can reveal a lot about a neuron’s role in computation and its wiring properties. The”
― György Buzsáki, The Brain from Inside Out

“Three procedures are used to investigate the passage of time: estimating an event duration, producing intervals, and reproducing intervals, as in a syncopation”
― György Buzsáki, The Brain from Inside Out

“Science is an iterative and recursive endeavor, a human activity. Recognizing and synthesizing critical insights takes time and effort. This is as true today as it has always been. A fundamental goal in neuroscience is identifying the principles of neuronal circuit organization.”
― György Buzsáki, The Brain from Inside Out

“Why is it difficult for scientists to write in simple language? One reason is because we are part of a community where every statement and idea should be credited to fellow scientists. Professional science writers have the luxury of borrowing ideas from anyone, combining them in unexpected ways, simplifying and illuminating them with attractive metaphors, and packaging them in a mesmerizing narrative. They can do this without hesitation because the audience is aware that the author is a smart storyteller and not the maker of the discoveries. However, when scientists follow such a path, it is hard to distinguish, both for them and the audience, whether the beautiful insights and earthshaking ideas were sparked from their own brains or from other hard-working colleagues.”
― György Buzsáki, The Brain from Inside Out

“Sharp wave ripples: this peculiar and unique brain pattern is viewed today as a subconscious mechanism to explore the organisms's options, searching for stored items of the past in the disengaged brain in order to extrapolate and predict possible future outcomes. It embodies a brain mechanism that compresses the discrete concepts of the past and future into a continuous stream.

There is no trigger for the occurrence of sharp wave ripples. They are not caused by anything. Instead, they are released, so to speak when subcortical neurotransmitters reduce their grip on hippocampal networks, as routinely happens during nonaroused or idle waking states, such as sitting still, drinking, eating, grooming, and non-rapid eye movement (REM) sleep.”
― György Buzsáki, The Brain from Inside Out

“The regulatory forces of sleep serve to restore population-wide dynamics to maintain a stable neuronal system. During sleep, release of subcortical neuromodulators is diminished, the neocortex is isolated from the influences of the outside world, and the thalamocortical system sustains its activity in a self-organized manner.”
― György Buzsáki, The Brain from Inside Out

“For example, when I observe something unusual in an experiment, it reverberates in my brain for a long while. Many circuits, especially the giant recurrent network of the hippocampus, can generate large numbers of neuronal trajectories without any signals from outside the brain. Even cultured brain tissue in a dish can induce a variety of spontaneous events. That is what neuronal circuits do.38 They do not just sit and wait to be stimulated. Based on these examples, now we may consider the possibility that learning is not an outside-in superimposition process where new neuronal sequences are built up with each novel experience. Instead, learning may be an inside-out matching process: when a spontaneously occurring neuronal trajectory, drawn from the available huge repertoire of trajectories, coincides with a useful action, that trajectory acquires meaning to the brain. The richer the experience, the higher the fraction of the meaningful trajectories, but there is always a large reservoir of available patterns.”
― György Buzsáki, The Brain from Inside Out

“I move, therefore I am. —Haruki Murakami1 In the beginning was the act. —Goethe’s Faust Not hearing is not as good as hearing, hearing is not as good as seeing, seeing is not as good as knowing, knowing is not as good as acting; true learning continues until it is put into action. —Confucius2”
― György Buzsáki, The Brain from Inside Out

“Next, we discussed the relationship between the tabula rasa (blank slate) and preconfigured brain models. In the empiricist outside-in model, the brain starts out as blank paper onto which new information is cumulatively written. Modification of brain circuits scales with the amount of newly learned knowledge by juxtaposition and superposition. A contrasting view is that the brain is a dictionary with preexisting internal dynamics and syntactical rules but filled with initially nonsense neuronal words. A large reservoir of unique neuronal patterns has the potential to acquire significance for the animal through exploratory action and represents a distinct event or situation. In this alternative model, the diversity of brain components, such as firing rates, synaptic connection strengths, and the magnitude of collective behavior of neurons, leads to wide distributions. The two tails of this distribution offer complementary advantages: the “good-enough” brain can generalize and act fast; the “precision” brain is slow but careful and offers needed details in many situations.”
― György Buzsáki, The Brain from Inside Out

“It comes with evolutionarily preserved, preconfigured internal syntactical rules that can generate a huge repertoire of neuronal patterns. These patterns are regarded as initially nonsense neuronal words which can acquire meaning through experience. Under this hypothesis, learning does not create brand new brain activity patterns from scratch but is instead a “fitting process” of the experience onto a preexisting neuronal pattern.”
― György Buzsáki, The Brain from Inside Out

“The core argument of this book is that the brain is a self-organized system with preexisting connectivity and dynamics whose main job is to generate actions and to examine and predict the consequences of those actions. This view—I refer to it as the “inside-out” strategy—is a departure from the dominant framework of mainstream neuroscience, which suggests that the brain’s task is to perceive and represent the world, process information, and decide how to respond to it in an “outside-in” manner.”
― György Buzsáki, The Brain from Inside Out

“Today’s neuroscience is full of subjective explanations that often rephrase but do not really expound the roots of a problem. As I tried to uncover the origins of widely used neuroscience terms, I traveled deeper and deeper into the history of thinking about the mind and the brain. Most of the terms that form the basis of today’s cognitive neuroscience were constructed long before we knew anything about the brain, yet we somehow have never questioned their validity. As a result, human-concocted terms continue to influence modern research on brain mechanisms. I have not sought disagreement for its own sake; instead, I came slowly and reluctantly to the realization that the general practice in large areas of neuroscience follows a misguided philosophy.”
― György Buzsáki, The Brain from Inside Out

“I want to make it as clear as possible that no meaning or advantage emerges for the brain without the ability to calibrate neural patterns by behavior-induced consequences. Without generating outputs to move and optimize the sensors, and calibrate brain circuits at some point in our lives, I claim, no perception or cognition exists.”
― György Buzsáki, The Brain from Inside Out

“Siegler”
― György Buzsáki, The Brain from Inside Out

“When zebra finches are raised by Bengalese finch foster parents, the juvenile birds retains the silent gaps characteristic of zebra finch song patterns, which is distinct from the shorter gaps of the Bengalese song. Thus, the syntactic rules are genetically inherited species-specific patterns, just like brain rhythms in mammals, whereas the variable content of the syllables and words can be acquired by experience. The pattern and content are processed by dissociable neuronal circuits in the bird's brain. In the auditory cortex, slow-firing neurons are mainly sensitive to the acoustic features, such as timbre and pitch. In contrast, faster firing, possible inhibitory, neurons encode the silent gaps and rhythm of the song, and they are insensitive to acoustic features. This division of labor between the inherited temporal patterns that serve as the syntax and the flexible content may be similar to the way human speech is organized.”
― György Buzsáki, The Brain from Inside Out

“A metaphor is a powerful tool to convey an idea because it relates a mysterious phenomenon to an understood one.”
― György Buzsáki, The Brain from Inside Out

“First, after the fast-firing neurons get tired, they take a long nap while previously dormant ones are invigorated, keeping the overall activity distribution the same but with revolving active participants. Second, the rate distributions remain correlated across brain states and across various testing situations, implying that some neurons must work harder than others forever. If you cannot decide, no worries. When I asked many of my colleagues, the majority favored the first option, but some argued in favor of the second, which is correct. Individual neurons maintain their firing rate ranks over days, weeks, and months, as if they sense their own firing outputs and adjust them to a set point customized to each cell.”
― György Buzsáki, The Brain from Inside Out

“Over the past decade, its Dialogues Between Neuroscience and Society series has featured such luminaries as the Dalai Lama, actress Glenn Close, dancer Mark Morris, and economist Robert Shiller. At the 2006 meeting in Atlanta, Frank Gehry was invited to discuss the relationship between architecture and neuroscience. After the talk, an audience member (actually it was me) asked him, “Mr. Gehry, how do you create?” His answer was both intuitive and funny: “There is a gear [in my brain] that turns and lights a light bulb and turns a something and energizes this hand, and it picks up a pen and intuitively gets a piece of white paper and starts jiggling and wriggling and makes a sketch. And the sketch somehow relates to all the stuff I took in.”4 Gehry’s answer is a perfect metaphoric formulation of the evolving neuronal assembly trajectory concept, the idea that the activity of a group of neurons is somehow ignited in the brain, which passes its content to another ensemble (from “gear to light bulb”), and the second ensemble to a third, and so forth until a muscular action or thought is produced. Creating ideas is that simple. To support cognitive operations effectively, the brain should self-generate large quantities of cell assembly sequences.”
― György Buzsáki, The Brain from Inside Out

“A verb can specify the action or event, describe the trajectory of an action with respect to some reference spatial point, indicate whether an action is completed or ongoing, and select the semantic roles of the participants in an action. Verbs in many but not all languages have a tense, referring to past, present, or future. They express not only the intent but also the mood of the speaker. For example, ambulatory movement can be described by a variety of verbs that refer to different speeds, moods, intentions, directions, and patterns of walking—in essence allowing the listener to visualize the action.70”
― György Buzsáki, The Brain from Inside Out

“Nearly all social interactions involve emotions. Patients with complete bilateral amygdala damage have difficulty judging people’s trustworthiness based on their appearance, compared to people with intact brains or control patients without amygdala damage. People with bilateral amygdala damage also cannot recognize fearful faces.66”
― György Buzsáki, The Brain from Inside Out

“Autism is usually defined not by its underlying mechanisms but by impaired social communication and repetitive behavior. One of the first things parents discover is that autistic children rarely solicit or reciprocate eye contact with caregivers, unlike normal infants. This difference becomes apparent by two to six months of age.61 There is nothing wrong with the eye movements in affected children; they simply look elsewhere.”
― György Buzsáki, The Brain from Inside Out

“Analogous to spatial navigation, two forms of hippocampus system-dependent memories can be distinguished. These are personal experiences (episodic memory or memory for specific instances) and memorized facts (semantic memory or memory for statistical regularities). We are consciously aware of both types and can verbally declare them, so together they are called declarative memories.”
― György Buzsáki, The Brain from Inside Out

“30 Before we discuss the ability of brain circuits to combine neuronal letters to words and words to sentences (Chapters 6 and 7), we need to address the expected advantages of such syntactical operations. Do not skip Chapter 5, please.”
― György Buzsáki, The Brain from Inside Out

“However, the absence of a rigorous definition raises many questions. Who has more cell assemblies, Albert Einstein, William Shakespeare, you, or me? If cell assemblies are created by training, as is typically the case in artificial neuronal networks, does the brain start with no assemblies and accumulate them over the years? How would the brain’s dynamic landscape look without any experience? What happens to cell assemblies during sleep? How big is a cell assembly? As the average path length in the brain is only a few synapses,15 every input-triggered ignition would spread to the entire brain through the excitatory connections.”
― György Buzsáki, The Brain from Inside Out