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The Brain from Inside Out Kindle Edition

4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 188 ratings

Is there a right way to study how the brain works? Following the empiricist's tradition, the most common approach involves the study of neural reactions to stimuli presented by an experimenter. This 'outside-in' method fueled a generation of brain research and now must confront hidden assumptions about causation and concepts that may not hold neatly for systems that act and react.

György Buzsáki's
The Brain from Inside Out examines why the outside-in framework for understanding brain function has become stagnant and points to new directions for understanding neural function. Building upon the success of 2011's Rhythms of the Brain, Professor Buzsáki presents the brain as a foretelling device that interacts with its environment through action and the examination of action's consequence. Consider that our brains are initially filled with nonsense patterns, all of which are gibberish until grounded by action-based interactions. By matching these nonsense "words" to the outcomes of action, they acquire meaning. Once its circuits are "calibrated" by action and experience, the brain can disengage from its sensors and actuators, and examine "what happens if" scenarios by peeking into its own computation, a process that we refer to as cognition.
The Brain from Inside Out explains why our brain is not an information-absorbing coding device, as it is often portrayed, but a venture-seeking explorer constantly controlling the body to test hypotheses. Our brain does not process information: it creates it.
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"The Brain from Inside Out is an impressive display of erudition, rounded off with just the right amount of storytelling and autobiographical notes." -- Alex Gomez-Marin, Instituto de Neurociencias de Alicante, Current Biology

"Overall, the book is profound and full of wisdom for both science and culture in general. It challenges the established views as to how the brain and the world work together, and it inspires new ideas regarding the psyche and consciousness." -- Gunnel Minett, Breathwork-Science

"a fascinating and impressive tour de force of contemporary neuroscience." -- Aaron Kozbelt, Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture

"Inside Out offers crossover appeal, but it is unabashedly broad and ambitious, aspiring to articulate a philosophy of how to think about the brain that shapes the future of neuroscience research. ... It will fuel the imaginations of young neuroscientists, as they invent new ways to understand the strange and wonderful meat inside our heads." -- Rachel Denison, The Cooper Square Review of Science, Medicine and Technology

"This outstanding book will challenge you to think deeply about how we should view the route to discovery in brain research. The primary argument of the book is that the brain is a self-organized system with a preexisting organization designed to generate actions and to evaluate and predict the consequences of those actions. This is contrasted with the dominant view in modern neuroscience that the brain exists to represent the world, process information and decide how to respond. The consequences of this distinction are presented from an historical and a scientific perspective done with remarkable scholarship and scientific rigor. As a welcome addition to the rapidly expanding dialogue on brain science and society, I hope it finds its way onto the desks of young people commencing careers in the neurosciences." --Marcus E. Raichle, MD, Alan A. & Edith L. Wolff Distinguished Professor in Medicine, Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology, Washington University of Medicine, St Louis, MO

"The Brain from Inside Out is a fascinating guided tour by a leading brain scientist of the race to address the biggest challenge of our times: understanding the inner workings of the brain. Buzsáki's ideas are at the same time personal and universal, offering an intimate look at the major hypotheses and roadblocks that drive brain science today. A wonderful read." --Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, PhD, Professor of Network Science, Northeastern University, Boston, MA and the author of The Formula

"In The Brain from Inside Out, Györgi Buzsáki shows us how dynamic patterns of activity in neurons actively generate good guesses rather than passively represent the outside world. Buzsáki is a master at vividly explaining what we know about brains and illuminating what we don't yet know." -- Terrence J. Sejnowski, PhD, Francis Crick Chair, Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, CA

About the Author

Gyorgy Buzsaki is Biggs Professor of Neuroscience at New York University. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences USA and corecipient of the 2011 Brain Prize. His main interest is "neural syntax," how segmentation of neural information is organized to support cognitive functions.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07QMY6MQ9
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Oxford University Press (April 18, 2019)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 18, 2019
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 13969 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 459 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 188 ratings

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Gyorgy Buzsaki
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see information:

http://osiris.rutgers.edu/frontmid/indexmid.html

Interviews:

http://brainsciencpodcast.wordpress.com/2008/02/22/brain-science-podcast-31-brain-rhythms-with-gyorgy-buzsaki

http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/01/10-questions-for-gyki.php

http://www.olegsenkov.com/Buzsaki.html

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4.6 out of 5 stars
188 global ratings

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Customers find the book insightful and a valuable resource for both science and non-scientists. They appreciate the clear writing style and diagrams that highlight experiments and concepts. The book is described as an interesting read with deep insights and well-supported arguments. Readers recommend it as a worthy follow-up to the classic Rhythms of the Brain.

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11 customers mention "Knowledge"11 positive0 negative

Customers find the book provides a comprehensive overview of scientific findings and insights. They appreciate its clear writing style, diagrams, and plots that highlight experiments and concepts. The book includes extensive references and indexing for further reading. While some parts are expert-level, others offer interesting fiction and fact sections. Overall, readers find the book offers a great deal to learn at a reasonable level.

"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..." Read more

"...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..." Read more

"...His books provide the level of breadth, technical detail, and inspiration needed to satisfy general curiosity or an ascent into brain-inspired..." Read more

"Interesting "Fiction and Fact from Sam's Almanac" but would benefit from much editing, to clear away the academic posturing...." Read more

9 customers mention "Writing quality"9 positive0 negative

Customers appreciate the book's writing quality. They find it well-written, with deep insight and a convincing argument. The author is described as a talented writer who understands the state of science well. The book provides detailed footnotes on subtle aspects and entertaining anecdotes.

"...are filled with gems of knowledge, complete with detailed footnotes on various subtle aspects and entertaining anecdotes...." Read more

"...It is written with deep insight, reflecting decades of the author's experience in research of the brain...." Read more

"...This neural syntax builds representations as proxies for space and time, even concepts...." Read more

"...Well thought, well supported, convincing. Several crucial things are missing, some others I disagree...." Read more

6 customers mention "Readability"6 positive0 negative

Customers find the book interesting and well-written. They say it's a worthy follow-up to the classic Rhythms of the Brain. The book offers scientific knowledge and intellectual rewards.

"...read by all, for both comprehensive scientific knowledge and deep intellectual reward." Read more

"This book is a worthy follow up to the classic Rhythms of the Brain...." Read more

"...But if you are up for it, there is plenty to captivate your interest and a great deal to learn." Read more

"Great book from a brilliant mind. Very interesting read" Read more

Inside or outside? Is the brain reactive or predictive? That's the question.
5 out of 5 stars
Inside or outside? Is the brain reactive or predictive? That's the question.
Move it. György Buzsáki discusses how higher cognitive functions and consciousness do not arise in an isolated vacuum inside an isolated brain, but in interaction with neurophysiological movement. He discusses alternatives to both inherited systems and tabula rasa - the blank slate models. These are aspects of movement and change in which all living things have a body with a physiological and electrobiological evolutionary development. Buzsáki is very cautious theoretically about the complicated electrophysiology of the brain, which he discusses in detail. I think this is brilliant and opens up many new possibilities for how the biochemical action potential might eventually interact with parallel electromagnetic systems between individual neurons - a neural 69.According to Buzsáki, the brain is a self-organising system whose main task is to predict meaningful activities for survival. Although he does not completely reject the old reactive learning paradigm (US-CS; etc.), he notes that the brain is not primarily a reactive device, but a predictive one. In self-adapting algorithmic mechanisms (with predictive errors) it is a kind of search engine, which in a psychologising context might be called "curiosity" - which is a fundamental survival mechanism. As a psychotherapist, one looks at when, where and how a patient's positive curiosity is triggered ("motivation").Buzsáki describes the brain as a predictive device that interacts with the environment to control our future decisions. The hypothesis is that our brains are born with a myriad of nonsense patterns, and by synchronising these nonsense patterns into cognitive or motor activities, they are shaped for meaningful learning.Is time perception just an illusion, relative to our perceived internal and external motion? Perhaps it is enough to think about a boring memory to realise this? Or that time perception varies between different ages and different experiences.... Buzsáki presents preliminary findings suggesting that hippocampal place and grid cells may have multiple sets of modalities that can also be understood simultaneously as "time cells" and thus encode memories as "memory cells" based on three aspects: distance, duration and "what system". He discusses how the distinction between place cells and time cells is actually irrelevant to the thinking brain, instead it is "how downstream reader mechanisms classify hippocampal messages". He sees the hippocampus as a general-purpose generator, encoding, sequencing and thus structuring the limited amount of ordinal-scale information available, heuristically covering the spaces between the various events that need to be ordered to provide a comprehensible context - albeit sometimes entirely contrived: compare how we try to make sense of various optical illusions. The hippocampus, in this context, is a repetitive apparatus, blindly doing the same thing over and over again in order to be encoded by frontal mechanisms.
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Top reviews from the United States

  • Reviewed in the United States on May 27, 2019
    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.
    28 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on February 1, 2020
    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.
    14 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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  • silas
    5.0 out of 5 stars Ground breaking
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 22, 2024
    Demanding read but worth it
  • Daniela
    5.0 out of 5 stars Un capolavoro.
    Reviewed in Italy on July 13, 2021
    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.
  • Dr. John Davis, Dept. Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences, McMaster University
    5.0 out of 5 stars A truly enthralling intellectual experience!
    Reviewed in Canada on November 28, 2019
    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.
  • Carolina
    5.0 out of 5 stars Mind blowing
    Reviewed in Spain on June 15, 2020
    Denso pero excelente
  • Matthieu Thiboust
    5.0 out of 5 stars An enlightening read
    Reviewed in France on November 28, 2019
    "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.

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