The Brain from Inside Out

By: Gyorgy Buzsaki

Narrated by: Rich Miller

Length: 11 hrs and 47 mins

Publisher's summary

Is there a right way to study how the brain works? The most common approach involves the study of neural reactions to stimuli presented by an experimenter.

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.

©2019 Oxford University Press (P)2021 Tantor

Recommend reading for neuroscientists, software engineers and AI scientists, and everyone else.

I highly recommend this book. I think this book includes new ideas about how nervous systems work. It also describes well supported reasons why concepts about how brains work that are commonly held by computer scientists, physicists, non-professional scientists, and most neuroscientists are probably wrong and are holding back progress in understanding mechanisms of brain function. Despite strongly recommending this book, please be aware that I (a fellow neuroscientist) think there are many incorrect statements and conjectures throughout. Central to my disagreements with ideas in this book is lack of acknowledgement that explanatory knowledge is an unbounded, is a real entity, and only grows consistently via human brain activity (as described by David Deutsch in his books). I recommend reading David Deutsch’s books (and be sure to understand them) prior to reading or listening to The Brain From Inside Out. If you proceed in that order, you should recognize that one of the main messages of this book (action as experimentation/criticism) is paramount to understanding brain function, is more correct than current consensus, but conflicts with the idea that knowledge starts with conjecture and is then tested by experimentation (which in turn relies on memory/information and computation). …so this is a highly recommended read after reading Deutsch’s books. Pay attention to and be sure to understand the dialogue about the “cryptoinductionist”. One additional criticism is that the statements in this currently reviewed book- that the human brain has effectively the same hardware component make up as other brains- is not supported by the evidence. In a related issue, it is weird that the author ignores the various types of glia cell types that have been shown to play a critical role in learning, memory, and information processing in the brain of animal models throughout decades of replicated research. It is a bit older, but The Other Brain by D. Fields is available on Audible that describes the state of research on glia in brain function as of about 11 years ago.

Starts super strong, then rambles

The first few chapters, where he lays the general principles of the Inside Out idea, are amazing, so interesting and insightful. But then the book becomes overdetailed, sometimes irrelevant, sometimes just very boring. It was really hard to finish it, and I'm a neuroscientist myself.

A major conceptual breakthrough in neuroscience

Prof. Gyorgy Buzsaki narrates in an approachable and candid manner his novel perpective on how the brain learns to effwctively mediate an organisms behavior in the open world environments. His arguments, based on decades of lab research make a vonvincing case for the in-out perspective whereby existing brain activity patterns are associated with outcomes and experiences in real world via action and comparison of prediction with actuality. In that sense it is compatible with the predictive coding theory where presictions are conditioned on the intended action.

Good book bad format

Needs a PDF to have much use, and I had to speed up the narrator to make listening bearable, but the book itself is an excellent.

No pdf which is referenced and critical.

No pdf which is referenced and critical to understanding. Should not be sold an audible book.