Buzsaki Lab – Search for a neural syntax

Research Goals

Today’s cognitive neuroscience largely follows the tradition of empiricism by looking for correspondences between ‘stimuli’ in the external world and their responses or ‘representations’ in the brain. This approach works well (sort of) in primary sensory areas but typically fails when cognitive or emotional mechanisms are to be investigated. The empiricist method is a bit like learning words in a foreign language, i.e., collecting correspondences between a known and a new language. The initial progress is fast. One can get by in a foreign country with just 100 words of vocabulary. However, when it comes to truly understanding a language, one needs to know the grammar, the syntactical rules that allow for the generation of virtually infinite combinations from finite numbers of lexical elements. Syntax allows for the segmentation of information into a temporal progression of discrete elements with ordered and hierarchical relationships (e.g. tempo, punctuation, etc), resulting in congruent interpretation of meaning. We endeavor to study the syntax, and not just the vocabulary, of the brain.

People

Meet our team of passionate researchers.

Publications

Complete list of peer-reviewed publications, books, chapters, reviews and essays.

Resources

Our publicly shared datasets, Buzcode, Neurosuite and Neurodata Without Borders

Public access to electrophysiological datasets collected in our lab

The Buzsaki Lab is proud to present a large selection of experimental data available for public access. We publicly share more than a thousand sessions (about 40TB of raw and spike- and LFP-processed data) via our public data repository. The datasets are from freely moving rodents and include sleep-task-sleep sessions (3 to 24 hrs continuous recording sessions) in various brain structures, including metadata. We are happy to assist you to use these data. Our goal is that by sharing these data, other users can provide new insights, extend (or contradict/clarify) our conclusions.

The database contains electrophysiological recordings performed in freely moving rats and mice collected by investigators in the Buzsaki Lab over several years (a subset from head-fixed mice). Sessions has been collected with extracellular electrodes using high-channel-count silicon probes, with spike sorted single units, and intracellular and juxtacellular combined with extracellular electrodes. Several sessions include physiologically and optogenetically identified units. The sessions have been collected from various brain region pairs: the hippocampus, thalamus, amygdala, post-subiculum, septal region and the entorhinal cortex and various neocortical regions. In most behavioral tasks, the animals performed spatial behaviors (linear mazes and open fields), preceded and followed by long sleep sessions. Brain state classification is provided.

Click here to learn more about accessing our data…