Cerebral Circuit Organization

2011 Brain Prize explainer:

Why sleep is important for the formation of memories. In this film, Brain Prize winner in 2011, György Buzsáki explains what happens in the hippocampus while we sleep and why it is important for memory formation. Work in his lab revealed that while we sleep, circuits in the hippocampus ‘replay’ at high-speed fragments of events that we experienced during the day. Each replay event only last 100 milliseconds but they are repeated of thousands of times each night.

These patterns of activity, known as hippocampal sharp wave ripples, can be thought of as the hippocampus writing and organising new memories for long-term storage in another part of the brain, the cortex.

Brain Prize portrait film: György Buzsáki.

In this short film, György Buzsáki shares his philosophy on the language and rhythms of the brain.

Brain Prize portrait film: Tamás Freund.

Tamás Freund describes his work on deciphering the logic of connectivity between cortical neurons and how this connectivity can explain the complex rhythms and dynamics and of the neocortex and hippocampus.

Brain Prize portrait film: Péter Somogyi.

Péter Somogyi talks about the precision and selectivity with which cortical neurons connect to one another.