György Buzsáki

György Buzsáki is a Hermann M. Biggs Professor of Neuroscience at New York University. His primary focus is “neural syntax”, i.e., how the numerous brain rhythms organize and segment neural information to support cognitive functions. He is among the top 0.1% most-cited neuroscientists, a member of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Academia Europaea, Fellow of AAAS, and he sits on the editorial boards of several leading neuroscience journals, including Science and Neuron, honoris causa at Université Aix-Marseille, France, University of Pecs and University of Kaposvar, Hungary. He is a co-recipient of the 2011 Brain Prize. 

Buzsáki’s main interest is “neural syntax,” which allows segmentation of brain activity so that an unlimited amount of information can be created from a limited set of elements, as in human language. His general hypothesis is that the brain's numerous rhythms are perpetually generated and are responsible for the syntactic segmentation of neural information and communication across brain regions (Rhythms of the Brain, OUP 2006). He has shown that these neuronal oscillations span several orders of magnitude in time (from a few milliseconds to several seconds), supporting neuronal commands ranging from fast motor responses to short-term memory. These individual oscillators form a nested hierarchical system in which the slower oscillation's phase modulates the faster one's amplitude, and so on (Science 2004). The interleaved fast and slow rhythms, therefore, can package and concatenate neuronal messages of various lengths, akin to letters, words, and sentences of language.

Within this broader framework, his laboratory focuses on the mechanisms of memory and associated diseases, particularly how sleep affects learned events. His most influential work is the two-stage model of memory trace consolidation (Neuroscience, 1999), which identifies hippocampal sharp-wave ripples (SPW-R) as a biomarker of memory transfer. Several laboratories worldwide have adopted his framework and provided supporting evidence for his model in experimental animals and human subjects. Relevant to clinical translation, hippocampal ripples and other brain rhythms (such as theta and gamma oscillations) identified by his laboratory support disease diagnosis and drug discovery.

(Books: Rhythms of the Brain, OUP, 2006; The Brain from Inside Out, OUP 2019)