The Brain from Inside Out Buzsáki, G. The Brain from Inside Out. Oxford University Press (May 2019) [Amazon] 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 [...]
Series Combats Disorders: First Up, Epilepsy People with epilepsy were once thought to be possessed by demons or evil spirits. Dubbed “the sacred disease,” epilepsy was profoundly misunderstood for centuries, even after the disorder was explained to be of human origin. So why is it, so many years later, that epilepsy is still not fully understood? And why is there still so much stigma attached to a disorder which affects [...]
Attendance of Buzsaki lab poster session at SFN2018 San Diego, Wednesday, 4 PM.
Optogenetics has rocked the world of neuroscience for more than a decade now. But neuroscientists want more from the technique—and less, including more depth and less invasiveness. As neuroscientists progress in their application of optogenetics, they want to take it further. This is evidenced by an explosion in the development of light-sensitive opsins that allow researchers to target neurons with amazing specificity. The result has been an explosion in understanding the relationships between [...]
In June of 2007, Albert Tsao, a nineteen-year-old native of Silver Spring, Maryland, was working in Trondheim, Norway, at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience. Tsao was a summer intern in the lab of May-Britt and Edvard Moser, married researchers who were well known in neurobiology circles for discovering “grid cells”—neurons that, by tracking our position, create a navigational map in the brain. Grid cells are located in an area of the brain [...]
Science works best when qualified people can evaluate evidence without political pressure to draw poorly founded conclusions, say 15 neuroscientists and physicists. Read the full story below or at theguardian.com As neuroscientists and physicists we have no reason to dispute that US diplomats living in Cuba heard loud noises, or that they reported feeling ill afterwards. Some US politicians have seized on these reports to construct conspiracy theories in which they imagine a mysterious disease-causing “sound [...]
Review article in Trends in Cognitive Sciences about our recent paper, by Alik S. Widge Transcranial electrical stimulation (TES) is a proposed tool for non-invasively modulating human brain circuits, but its ability to affect cortical physiology remains unclear. A recent study merged TES with live animal and human cadaveric recordings to verify intracranial electrical effects, then used these findings to develop a novel neuro-modulation protocol. Read the full review here and see our related [...]
Scientific American has written a piece about our recent paper by Mihály Vöröslakos et al. looking at the effects of transcranial electric stimulation in rats and humans. You can find their artic here and our below. Direct effects of transcranial electric stimulation on brain circuits in rats and humans. Mihály Vöröslakos, Yuichi Takeuchi, Kitti Brinyiczki, Tamás Zombori, Azahara Oliva, Antonio Fernández-Ruiz, Gábor Kozák, Zsigmond Tamás Kincses, Béla Iványi, György Buzsáki & Antal Berényi. Nature Communications 9 [...]
Memory transfer for long-term storage Explicit memory formation involves the transfer of rapidly encoded information from the hippocampus to long-term storage sites in the association cortex. Khodagholy et al. developed a microelectrode system for large-scale simultaneous electrophysiological monitoring of multiple sites in the rat neocortex. They observed discrete high-frequency neocortical oscillations called ripples only in the association cortex. These cortical ripples shared many properties with hippocampal ripples. Hippocampal ripples were coupled with cortical [...]
Omid is our newest Postdoctoral fellow. He has background in Electrical Engineering and Electronic Devices. He received his PhD in Organic Electronics from Ecole Polytechnique, France and his current research interest and focus is on the interactions of external electromagnetic fields with the brain.