Good Vibrations GyörgyBuzsákiRhythms of the Brain2006Oxford University Press464 pp., $69.50, hardcover

One Sunday afternoon in July 1924, an eccentric Austrian psychiatrist detected for the first time a faint electrical oscillation at about 10 Hz emanating from an awake intact human brain. Hans Berger carried out these experiments on his 15-year-old son in secret and only reported his discovery of the human encephalogram (EEG) 5 years later, disappointed that it had failed to provide the scientific basis for telepathy that he had long been seeking. Instead, the finding that the EEG changed with arousal states and adopted clearly abnormal patterns during seizures and other neurological disorders revolutionized the practice of neurology by providing the first objective and noninvasive tool to study the function, as opposed to the structure, of the human brain. The subject of György Buzsáki’s remarkable book, Rhythms of the Brain, is not so much the pathological synchronization of neurons during seizures but the many oscillations detected in the normal brain, mammalian and invertebrate, as it sleeps, wakes, and performs higher-level processes such as perception, attention, and memory. The author reminds the reader early on that every membrane, neuron, or circuit must have characteristic resonant properties. To an engineer, this is often a nuisance: excessive vibrations must be damped or cancelled for the machine to run smoothly, otherwise the periodic movements will cause excessive wear on the components. But what is one to do when faced with the background hum emanating from the normal brain? Is it just a by-product of neuronal and circuit computations, which must be kept in check to prevent run-away synchronization of larger and larger populations of neurons? Buzsáki elegantly and persuasively argues the opposite view throughout this book, that oscillations are the backbone upon which subsets of neurons are assembled and disassembled, as necessary substrates of attention, representation, and intention. Of course, any book that approaches the most complex entity known to mankind with a theme apparently as simple as rhythms or oscillations can leave the reader wondering what it is really about. Buzsáki takes a highly original approach to cover the interface between cellular neuroscience and theories of brain function over a very broad range. He starts with some of the fundamental physics of oscillations and takes in some theoretical considerations of the behavior of distributed systems composed of connected nodes. He quickly covers much of the cellular neuroscience and anatomy of brain circuits relevant to the various rhythms detected in the brain and then moves on to the different brain states characterized by these rhythms. Finally, he turns his attention to the actual computations