Buzsáki’s Neural Syntax and Self-Caused Rhythms

Neuroscientist György Buzsáki presents the brain as “a foretelling device that interacts with its environment through action and the examination of action's consequence,” restructuring its internal rhythms in the process. In his telling, “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 brain circuits are “calibrated” or trained 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.” Buzsáki stresses that “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. He says, our brain “creates it” (Buzsáki, 2019).

Buzsáki focuses on "neural syntax," which segments neural information and organizes it via diverse brain rhythms to generate and support cognitive functions. One expression is the “hierarchical organization of brain rhythms of different frequencies and their cross-frequency coupling.” Buzsáki shows that “in the absence of changing environmental signals, cortical circuits continuously generate self-organized cell assembly sequences”—clusters of neurons acting as focused functional units—that are the neuronal assembly basis of cognitive functions. He also shows “how skewed distribution of firing rates supports robustness, sensitivity, plasticity, and stability in neuronal networks” (“György Buzsáki,” 2024).

Buzsáki's foundational idea is that “spontaneous neuron activity, far from being mere noise, is actually the source of our cognitive abilities,” and that “self-emerged oscillatory timing is the brain's fundamental organizer of neuronal information.” The perpetual interactions among these multiple network oscillators, he says, “keep cortical systems in a highly sensitive ‘metastable’ state and provide energy-efficient synchronizing mechanisms via weak links” (Buzsáki, 2011).

Taken together, Buzsáki coins his “inside-out” view. “The brain,” he says, “is a self-organized system with preexisting connectivity and dynamics whose main job is to generate actions and to examine and predict the consequences of those actions.” Brains draw from and interact with the world, rather than detect it. “In other words, rather than the world filling in the brain with information, the brain fills out the world with action.” Flipping the brain–world relationship, Buzsáki posits that brain activity is fundamentally self-caused (Gómez-Marín, 2021).

Brain rhythms are Buzsáki's key mechanisms. “Spanning several orders of magnitude, and organized in nested frequency bands, these fascinating neuronal oscillations support neuronal syntax.” As Buzsáki puts it, “activity travels in neuronal space, much like waves in a pond.” Cognition is merely internalized action, and it arises when the brain disengages from the world. He thus recasts “the cognitive into the neural by means of action as a kind of ultimate cognitive source. It is action all the way in, all the way out, and all the way down” (Gómez-Marín, 2021).

Meaning, Memory, and Consciousness

Still, Buzsáki must explain how endogenously produced neural syntax acquires its meaning, and to do so, he reaches outside the brain. Semantics are selected by the world, he stresses, and here's how it works. External inputs, sequences of perceptions that constitute wholes or fragments of meaning, engage and modify self-organized neural patterns so that they become meaningful and useful (broadly). Similarly, Buzsáki has learning as a matching process. “Existing, spontaneous neural patterns are selected rather than constructed anew. The brain is not a blank slate but one filled with syntactically correct gibberish that progressively acquires meaning via the pruning of the arbitrariness that the world affords” (Gómez-Marín, 2021).

Related, Buzsáki and Tingley explain cognition, including memory, “by exaptation and expansion of the circuits and algorithms serving bodily functions.” They explain how “Regulation and protection of metabolic and energetic processes require time-evolving brain computations enabling the organism to prepare for altered future states.” The exaptation of such circuits, according to the authors, was likely exploited for exploration of the organism's niche, giving rise to “a cognitive map,” which in turn “allows for mental travel into the past (memory) and the future (planning)” (Buzsáki & Tingley, 2023). Moreover, Buzsáki's “two-stage model of memory trace consolidation demonstrates how neocortex-mediated information during learning transiently modifies hippocampal networks, followed by reactivation and consolidation of these memory traces during sharp wave-ripple patterns of sleep” (Buzsáki, 2024).

While explaining that cognition is not the same thing as explaining phenomenal consciousness, Buzsáki's theory of cognition can develop into its own theory of consciousness. Moreover, it can help select among other theories of consciousness, as it aligns more consistently with some Neurobiological Theories, such as Brain Circuits and Cycles; possibly Electromagnetic Field Theories; and certainly Homeostatic and Affective Theories, especially Top-Down Predictive Theories.