The Brain from Inside Out Reprint Edition

This is one of the best Neuroscience books of all time, written by a true genius/polymath of our time, who is just a walking encyclopedia of scientific knowledge. This is a must-read for all who wish to understand how the brain works - from aspiring students to seasoned experts, and interested lay public to forward-thinking funding agencies.Dr. Buzsáki presents a profound and critical re-assessment of systems level Neuroscience research today, calling for a paradigm shift from the prevailing “outside-in” perspective (i.e., characterizing neuronal functions by externally delivered stimuli or preconceived psychological notions) to an alternative “inside-out” framework (centered on internally generated network oscillations).The author flips the traditional view of perception-action cycle around and argues that it is the action that grounds all incoming perceptual inputs, that it is the active exploration of environment that provides meaning to the neural information being processed.The early chapters lay out the foundation of this paradigm-shifting argument, amply supported by a comprehensive review of much of Systems Neuroscience, especially the notion of corollary discharge from motor/frontal cortex to sensory/association cortex. This idea is prescient, as recent data from cortex-wide and brain-wide large-scale neural recordings have shown that this action-centered grounding may very well be correct.The middle chapters lead readers on a deep dive into the world of brain rhythms, the hippocampal place cell system, the logic and mechanisms of gain control in neural network operation. They are filled with gems of knowledge, complete with detailed footnotes on various subtle aspects and entertaining anecdotes. Reading through the chapters, I’ve gained an integrated understanding of all these various pieces of information that I’ve encountered over the years. It is as if having conversed with a wise sage, which I imagine Dr. Buzsáki must be.In the final chapters, Dr. Buzsáki presents new ideas on the log-normal distributions found in all aspects of neuronal organization and how they support a new unified theory of fast and slow dynamics in the brain. He also lays out a radical new idea that the “inside-out” perspective suggests that learning is not an internalized representation of experiences but a matching process between the internally generated neural network patterns and environmental stimuli - an inborn dictionary of words devoid of meaning that is matched with their meanings through an individual’s exploration of its environment in each unique lifetime.Overall, the book is profound and full of both wisdom for both science and beyond. It challenges one’s notion of how the brain and the world work, and it inspires new ideas for discussion and experiments. This is a book that should be read by all, for both comprehensive scientific knowledge and deep intellectual reward.

This book is a worthy follow up to the classic Rhythms of the Brain. It is written with deep insight, reflecting decades of the author's experience in research of the brain. It is an elegant book offering a cornucopia of empiric findings tied together by the silver lining of its author's deep understanding of the workings of the brain.The main argument of this book is that the brain is primarily a motor control tool for the organism rather than a medium for symbolic representation of the objective external world. Its main job is to generate actions and predict the consequences of these actions. Buzsaki rejects the general accepted objectivistic view of the stimulus as the primary initiator for the cognitive action.Buzsaki states: "brain evolved not to represent anything but to help its body to survive and reproduce." It does this by connecting itself with the world through Merleau-Ponty's action-perception arc facilitated by corollary discharges rather than accepted "outside-in" view of brain-as-a-computer metaphor. I wish more contemporary neural scientists would embrace this view.Buzsaki observes that muscles are the second cell type in the body that can rapidly change their membrane potential and generate an action potential. He compares fly's zig-zag flight patterns to saccadic patterns of mammal vision. His neuronal assembly concept goes way beyond Hebb's (or Hayek's) view in that, in his view, the principal cells in the neural assembly need not be anatomically connected. He makes the observation that brain areas in charge of generating plans share many similarities with the motor cortex and embraces Bernstein's muscle synergies and favors multiple coordinate systems rather than a single master coordinates. His contribution to the ongoing discussion of hippocampal sharp-wave-ripples alone qualifies him as a true pioneer in the field and rightfully comprises significant portions of the book. No one understands "Rhythms of the Brain" better than he does.There are two metaphors Buzsaki embraces that I disagree with: The first is the view that neuronal syntax is similar to the Chomskian language syntax where "words" and "sentences" are embedded in beta and gamma brain oscillations. Chomsky himself has a low opinion of neural science and is not troubled by the fact that to this day, no one found neural structures in the brain responsible for the generation of "universal" syntax structures. Chomsky's work was soundly and brilliantly criticized in the 1980s by George Lakoff, who replaced his abstract generative syntax with much more embodied theory, more amenable to action-perception view Buzsaki embraces. Ironically, Lakoff collaborated for a while with the seminal Berkeley neural scientist Walter Freeman, only to replace in the end the motor grounded neural science with symbolic AI structures. A.M Liberman's motor theory of language does a much better job in proving Lakoff right.The second metaphor Buzsaki embraces is the view of the brain as a circuit in which symbolic messages are transmitted between the neurons via axonal synaptic connections, rather than a view of the brain as a dynamic field maintained by resonance and coupling through electric dipoles formed by high-speed transmembrane ion channels, i.e., ephapsis. In my view, the concept of information processing grounded in static neural circuits processing symbolic representations of the objective world is incompatible with Merleau-Ponty's theory. While Buzsaki comes close to Merleau-Ponty's view, in the end, he concludes that the "brain's ability to manipulate models of the external world is a prerequisite for cognition."Nevertheless, both of these metaphors, while unhelpful, are pervasive in the western world, and "everyone lives by" them. Buzsaki's embrace of either does not detract from the significant contribution of this major work. Highly Recommended.

Demanding read but worth it

Libro fondamentale per qualsiasi lettore interessato alle neuroscienze. Puntuale, emozionante, intenso, pieno di idee e concetti. Tante suggestioni e riflessioni. Stimolante. Pochi libri allo stesso livello, Damasio, Changeux... Niente è banale e niente è dato per scontato. Non è il report divulgativo di studi accademici, ma un vero e proprio reframe in prospettiva filosofica.Richiede già delle conoscenze base sul cervello e il suo funzionamento per essere letto agevolmente. Lettura non velocissima, 360 pagine che pensavo di fare in 4gg o quasi, invece sta prendendo una settimana e più, ma molto molto appagante.

The Brain from Inside Out is excellent reading. Its arguments are presented with wonderful clarity and understandable examples, and its contextualization within the history of philosophy and neuroscience is superb. As a clinical neuropsychologist who specializes in behavioral rehabilitation, Professor Buzsaki's book re-connects me to critical research and concepts that my endeavors rest on, and inspires me to learn more. I greatly appreciate the work by Professor Buzsaki and its presentation in The Brain from Inside Out.

Denso pero excelente

"The Brain from Inside Out" is a very enlightening book.Experimental results make more sense when interpreted within the inside-out rather than the dominant outside-out framework.It is misguided to think of the brain as a complex device that sequentially collect sensory inputs, process information, and then decide whether and how to act. Thinking from inside-out, the brain hosts internally generated and self-organized patterns that acquire "meaning" through actions, which becomes what we call "experiences". Action is a prerequisite of perception (the expression "active sensing" makes it explicit). This primacy of action is in line with the brain's main job of controlling complex behavioral activities.Before reading this book, I already had the fuzzy intuition that action-grounded experiences provide the ultimate source of knowledge. By revisiting the interpretation of an impressive number of experimental results, György Buzsáki helped me to transform this intuition into a conviction with a clear inside-out framework to progress further. Now, my main interrogation is the progressive transition from perception to cognition: how do symbols get detached from their sensorimotor interaction while preserving their grounding? No doubt that brain-inspired artificial intelligence will benefit from the inside-out framework.