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Title: Rhythms of the Brain
ISBN: 0195301064
Author:
Gyorgy Buzsaki
Publicate Date: 2006-08-03
Publish: 2006-08-03
List Price: $69.50
Average Customer Rating: 5.0
Format: Hardcover
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $53.65
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $52.90
Amazon Merchant Price: $55.60
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| Customer Review: |
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1: If you have not read it, for our own brain health, just do!
Really hard to find something like it (Nunez, Eccles and Shepherd work is some how on that level), and almost impossible to find a better one. A classic neuroscience work!
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2: Complete book
Nearly every brain oscillation is discussed, and importantly, the descriptions are very detailed, ad aided by numerous footnotes and useful references. I recommend this book to anyone interested in brain waves, their interactions, functions and their possible origins.
Also a word of warning: despite, or perhaps because of the completeness of the text, the book may not be very reader-friendly in some places: Full understanding of new theories or topics may require additional reading of the references, chiefly in chapter 11 and 12. Also, everyone I know who read this book took a pretty long time reading it through. In a way, it is not so much an explanation as it is a reference book.
If you have not read other books dealing with this subject, I recommend reading 'A Universe Of Consciousness' by Edelman and Tononi, first.
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3: Like the brain itself
The Buzsaki book on brain rhythms is a marvellous tour of neuroscience from the cellular through the behavioural to the wisely hypothetical. The concepts are presented in loops and cycles, with deep foot-notes, analogous to the brain mechanisms Buzsaki so clearly and entertainingly describes. Again, modelling brain processes themselves, Buzsaki has interacted with colleagues from many disciplines outside biology to emerge with succinct accounts of neural mechanisms.
Particularly enjoyable in this content-packed book, is that Buzsaki incorporates historical gems to acknowledge the origins of many of the fundamental ideas.
In the course of a few months, this book has become my most thumbed and dog-eared neuroscience reference.
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4: Brain functon, not just structure
This makes an excellent complement to Christof Koch's The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach. Koch's book is oriented to structure and hierarchical wiring, while Buzsaki's book is devoted to what goes through those wires- the large-scale firing and oscillations whose meaning is still mostly unclear, but whose persistence and complexity have captivated researchers for well over a hundred years. Which is more successful at illuminating consciousness? Buzsaki, by a mile! I found Koch's book somewhat disappointing, since after a huge build up of pretty well-known visual system anatomy and processing, his treatment of consciousness amounts to a brief bit of hand-waving. Buzsaki, on the other hand, while he does not make grand claims to even deal with consciousness, illuminates more of the temporal integration that is going on in the brain, and which will be absolutely central to plumbing this question. He also leaves the reader with extremely penetrating observations about consciousness- as a whole-brain phenomenon (or at least a whole-cortex), that it must be continuously graded with the size of brains, and that it is deeply connected with timing- with an approximate simultaneity of experience and integrated signal processing.
All that said, it is important to note that while Buzsaki is capable of excellent writing, such as in the introductory cycles (chapters), he routinely loses sight of the reader when presenting his own work and fields he is close to (in the middle and later cycles). The reader has to plow through mountains of unintroduced anatomy, private thoughts that seem never to have met an editor, and woefully under-enlarged and under-annotated illustrations. One wants to give him the benefit of the doubt that he is not covering up a lack of understanding, but the text can be trying at times, at least for the non-specialist. I would encourage work on a second edition where typos and illustrations are fixed, where all anatomy mentioned in the text is illustrated and described, and where substantial parts of the later cycles are re-written- expanded where there is substance, or cut where speculations and caveats outstrip the material.
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5: The beat goes on!
"Rhythms of the Brain" by Gyorgy Buzsaki is a brilliant introduction to neuronal oscillations and fundamentals of brain functions. An enjoyable and useful read for both lay reader and accustomed professional.
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