György Buzsáki Books

"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 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 brain's fundamental organizer of neuronal information." "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 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."--Jacket

This book brings together leading investigators who represent various aspects of brain dynamics with the goal of presenting state-of-the-art current progress and address future developments. The individual chapters cover several fascinating facets of contemporary neuroscience from elementary computation of neurons, mesoscopic network oscillations, internally generated assembly sequences in the service of cognition, large-scale neuronal interactions within and across systems, the impact of sleep on cognition, memory, motor-sensory integration, spatial navigation, large-scale computation and consciousness. Each of these topics require appropriate levels of analyses with sufficiently high temporal and spatial resolution of neuronal activity in both local and global networks, supplemented by models and theories to explain how different levels of brain dynamics interact with each other and how the failure of such interactions results in neurologic and mental disease. While suchcomplex questions cannot be answered exhaustively by a dozen or so chapters, this volume offers a nice synthesis of current thinking and work-in-progress on micro-, meso- and macro- dynamics of the brain.